It's cool. I stalk the discord and the forums, so I pick up the dev chatter.
Hope you're enjoying it! I love how there's no central servers like Plex has. It's my own private Netflix so I can share what I have with my friends and family easily!
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.
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.
I've used it on my collection, album for album. It usually works great with the autodetect-function, but it gets some albums horribly wrong (or not at all), so I am glad I did it piece by piece. Took a long time, but now I just need to do it every once in a while when I add something to the collection.
LOL the "horribly wrong" is the part that worries me. We already have good mp3 tags for most of the collection, so I don't want to make things worse. Thanks for the info, though.
It seems jellyfin is confused by songs that have two artists, like duets. It can handle it at the song level, but those "merged" artists appear (as a separate artist) at the artist level too.
And I finally put my finger on what's wrong with the default view: It says "albums" but collection albums show separately under each artist that has a song on that album. That makes sense for the album-artist view, but not albums. Albums should combine those, in my thinking at least.
LOL the “horribly wrong” is the part that worries me. We already have good mp3 tags for most of the collection, so I don’t want to make things worse. Thanks for the info, though.
Most commonly the issue is that it guesses the wrong album release, and puts any extra tracks in a separate compilation album. The songs are still tagged right, but the album is wrong. The worst problem I've encountered is when all songs were tagged completely wrong (different names etc.). Happened once or twice for me, but enough to not want to do everything in one go.
It seems jellyfin is confused by songs that have two artists, like duets. It can handle it at the song level, but those “merged” artists appear (as a separate artist) at the artist level too.
I don't have this issue. I separate the artists with a semicolon, so it is displayed "Artist 1, Artist 2" with each artist being clickable to go into their individual artist page. But I think you could actually tag 'artist' as "Artist 1 & Artist 2" and 'artists' as "Artist 1; Artist 2", and it will show up correctly, i.e. displayed as "Artist 1 & Artist 2", but shown in the artist overview separately as "Artist 1" and "Artist 2". I think...
I don’t have this issue. I separate the artists with a semicolon, so it is displayed “Artist 1, Artist 2” with each artist being clickable to go into their individual artist page. But I think you could actually tag ‘artist’ as “Artist 1 & Artist 2” and ‘artists’ as “Artist 1; Artist 2”, and it will show up correctly, i.e. displayed as “Artist 1 & Artist 2”, but shown in the artist overview separately as “Artist 1” and “Artist 2”. I think…
Yeah, going in and fixing them individually seems to clean it up (I probably should check that more closely)...but we have a LOT of duets, it seems.
Picard (the MusicBrainz program in question) absolutely needs hand holding. When I decided to do the initial run through of my library, I went artist by artist and album by album. There's a temptation to just throw everything at it. But there are enough releases and re-releases, and instances of a single song/recording being on multiple albums that it was much less headache to never try to more than one album at a time. That hand holding is a good thing in my opinion despite the tedium. There's just too much content for any automated system to reliably handle all the match collisions. Lidarr works because it more or less goes album by album too. Lidarr can do a pretty good job of screwing everything up though, so that's the one to keep separate or be very careful and test settings thoroughly. I'm still finding weird ways that lidarr has mangled stuff I'd already tagged and renamed with Picard because of a badly formed renaming format string in lidarr's settings.
The was playing with Picard this afternoon. It did a good job finding what I had, though it seemed like it was updating the mp3 data before I was hitting save. I need to play with it more to understand it better.
Once it finds a match, it will show you a comparison of the tags for each file before and after. Maybe that's what you saw. As far as I know, it only writes the tags and renames the files once you hit save. If there is an option to write the tags before you choose to save, I've never seen or used it. You can of course choose to not rename the files and just fix the tags.
Yeah I think the interface confused me at first, I figured it out last night. Basically you are matching files in the top left to the top right (either automatically or manually). Once it matches it shows the before and after at the bottom, then click save to update the file. Useful!
I was having issues getting Jellyfin to update some data, in particular release date/year, even after using Identify on them and pointing to the correct album. I had to manually update that info for several of albums. Maybe the incorrect info in the mp3 tags overrides what it gets from the internet. That would explain it.
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.
It doesn't directly integrate with Jellyfin, but it does store the media in a directory and file format that works well with it. I use it to subscribe to media playlist pages that yt-dlp supports and I get them added to Jellyfin automatically.
I was considering adding pictures when I have the chance, I'll see if I can do it later!
I understand now, thank you, very informative images, it helps a lot.
If you add a playlist link will it automatically download new videos added to the playlist in the future? Or only existing ones at the time of subscription?
Maybe a feature request: Is it possible to add channels? So it automatically downloads new videos uploaded to a channel?
It's meant to periodically scan the locations for new content, so yes, newly added ones will be downloaded as well. By default it scans every 10 minutes!
As for channels, it supports any web page that yt-dlp can parse as a playlist, so more than likely whatever kind of page you're thinking of will work as well!
A refresh of that page should show a progress meter.
In order to encourage more accurate detection (assuming it can find/access the new file at all), there are advised naming schemes for your files.
See here for a basic overview: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies
I prefer to include the full name, year and imdb info of a movie, ie Citizen Kane isn't just "Citizen.Kane.mp4", it's:
"Citizen Kane (1941) [imdbid-tt0033467].mp4"
based on the information that's publically available here https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033467/
Even if you don't enable imdb itself for the metadata lookup, that will give you an almost guaranteed detection during a library scan.
If this sounds like too much work, there's several automated tools for naming your personal dvd rips, such as Radarr.
If it's still not being detected, it's time to dig into the logs and find out WHY it's erroring.
Is it permissions?
Is it naming?
Is it the phase of the moon?
Currently, everything is setup on my main desktop which is currently on a battery backup as well as my modem and router since we occasionally have a “blink” in the power which could frack up my entire setup. I’ll move to a proper NAS setup with a mini-PC eventually, but it’s not a priority.
I use Jellyfin as a whole “Netflix” experience, where the library is always expanding and nothing ever leaves the library unless I just get annoyed (looking at you, Netflix ATLA). I’ve got about 20TB of space spread across three drives and backups of everything, so whatever sparks my whimsy to add to the library gets added. Someone quips, “Bears, Beets, Battlestar Galactica” and I think, “Hm…maybe I should Battlestar Galactica to my Jellyfin?” I add it, and it’s just there whenever I’m ready.
I’ve shared with 8 friends and family so far. They don’t all use it constantly; some forget about it, some watch it all day and night for like 5 days in a row, some ask for something and watch immediately, others ask for stuff and don’t watch ever.
I have to add that Jellyfin has actually been life-changing for me. Prior to Jellyfin, my solution was a cheap laptop attached to each TV in the house that held a fair amount of my total content via smaller external drives, and there was no cohesiveness, so I could never “get into” shows because I’d have to remember where I’d left off, and make sure the files were copied to the relative laptop, or somehow try to stream from the main desktop through Windows Network which didn’t always connect.
Now, have access to every single part of my collection on all three TVs, and share with my friends and family who have given up on paying for 7 different streaming apps, and also I have access to everything when I travel.
I just wish that I was adept in some language so I could actively help with a project I love so much. ☺️
Cool. There's a db fail bug elsewhere that I didn't run into thankfully.
I had to switch from ConfusedPolarBear(archived on GitHub now) to this fork for intro skipping. Works great.
I'm still scanning for the new trickplay function but I've been hoping for something like that. It was disabled in the settings by default, plus you have to enable it on a per-library basis, and of course you can either wait for the schedule to start the scan, or start it yourself in scheduled tasks.
I guess not. To be fair, if I wanted intro skipping to be baked in to whatever I'm using, I'd pay $5 or $6/month for Plex or Emby. I paid for Plex Pass for years, but I'm switching away because I think Plex is getting too "commercial" if that makes sense.
Jellyfin is great so far, and if I have to spend 5 minutes installing an add-on to get intro skipping, that's fine with me.
Hoping that it gets included soon as the folks developing the Android TV client have said they don't want to support intro skipping until it's part of Jellyfin core. Until then the only option is auto skipping and I don't really want to do that.
I thought intro-skipping had been included in Jellyfin now but this doesn't seem to be the case (can't find it in release notes) … Thanks for the tip for the 10.9 plugin 😸
Forcing subtitle burn in would require every item to be transcoded.
In Jellyfin you need to go to User Settings > Subtitles > Burn > All.
And probably change subtitle mode too to always have them on.
Then in Jellyfin add-on for Kodi you need to make sure you go via the jellyfin server (add-on mode I think?) not native mode.
Ohh, you've just found a great workaround to a problem I have with my Google TV. It direct plays 4K HDR videos with ogg audio (quite poorly, I might add) I'd rather have transcoded.
If you just want to remove audio and subtitle tracks, don’t use Handbrake. That will re-encode your video which will result in quality loss. Use MKVToolNix or FFmpeg to remux instead and only remove the tracks you don’t want.
Remuxing is also much faster and less cpu intensive than re-encoding.
Doesn't handbrake has an option to not re-encode the video ? But yeah totally agree, it's not worth it to re-encode everything just to remove audio tracks.
I can't check right now, but I'm pretty certain I've used MKVToolNix to remove unwanted audio files from an mp4 before. However, the result will always be remuxed to mkv.
I use Jellyfin for movies, TV shows and music.
For music, I use Symfonium as a client on my android phone, as it feels the most feature rich, and has android auto integration.
For anyone else like me that hasn’t updated yet and/or generally unfamiliar with the term “Trickplay”, it’s the handy feature that allows you to hover over the progress bar and see snapshots of the content at various times.
Just commenting as a public service since I had to search around a bit before I found an actual description.
Personally, intro-skipper is my absolute must-have.
Also, media cleaner is good for those who watch a lot of content but then don't want to keep it. It's controversial as most users want to keep content. But you can configure to keep your favourites. I do this for films, but then tv shows I watch once and let it clean up after me as I don't care to see it again. Combined with the *arrs for fetching content, it means I don't need to ever manage tv shows.
Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System
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