Time and time again, media will be removed from public viewing for nearly any reason. Online streaming services have what you want to watch only so long as their license to it is valid. Once it expires, it's gone off that platform - and not always to another one. Or the media gets edited to remove or alter something the owners don't want to promote.
This is even true for the varying methods of sailing. Not everything will be available indefinitely. Certainly not at zero effort. While not being as simple as signing up for a service and watching a low bitrate copy of something within thirty seconds, it's not rocket science. You can get Jellyfin running with a small library in half an hour.
Ultimately, do what suits you. A local media server works for some. Others will have everything in a single folder and view it through VLC. It's pretty irrelevant though when the vast majority just pay a subscription to one or multiple of the streaming companies that continue to serve watered down libraries at ever increasing prices.
I don't know what you are talking about. I have never been unable to access whatever media I wanted using nothing but a web browser for the last 20 years.
The last problem I can remember having is not being able to see season 2 of interview with a vampire on streamio because of some weird glitch. So I opened a browser and played it in like 15 seconds just by googling what I wanted to watch and Free TV.
I think I explained what I was talking about rather well. Trying to view a piece of media in its highest release format isn't something that's always feasible. Anything even a few years old can to difficult to source. Ask anyone rebuilding a library after a drive failure. It's even worse if what you're trying to get had low viewership - it means an even smaller pool of people bothering to host the data.
While I'm sure this is a niche situation within a niche situation, hosting your own media library locally allows offline playback. Quite nice in during a thunderstorm. Not an option with what you've described as your methods, but again, definitely an uncommon use case.
Huh. I saw cashback many years ago on tv or something but could never figure out the name even after a lot of googling. And here we are I've finally found it thanks to you. Maybe I'll give it another watch. For a long time I've thought about the thing of not looking at the clock when doing unpleasant activities.
Thanks!
This is great to hear, now maybe hire some more developers to make it work so i can switch. I desperately want to ditch plex, and i have jellyfin installed along side it for testing. It still regularly fails at basic content matching, playback of various files, and has significantly worse transcoding performance than plex.
So while I'm desperate to escape them as they charge for basic features like tone mapping I'm also stuck until an alternative is at least as usable as plex. It's the one thing i don't have an open source self host for at this point.
I've got immich for photos, Seafile for storage, my own pastebin, a piped instance (YouTube front end), a whoogle instance and several other self host alternatives. Really hoping jellyfin can take over for plex
Hey, I've worked in the recommendations/similarity calculations. Could you post a screenshot of the detail page for Inside Out? I suspect your media doesn't have associated metadata (e.g. tmdb tags) that are used to power similarity calculations.
I think I have Jellyfin mostly at the default setings, with one exception. I did change the name of the key for the rating variable in the metadata to be 'MPAA rating' instead of the default which I think was 'rating' before since I found it confusing. So if the current recommendation calculation is using that variable then I guess it would be null for all my media.
Also, here is the metadata jellyfin shows.
Inside Out (2015)
Container: mkv
Path: /mnt/ext4/film/film/Movies/Inside Out (2015).mkv
Size: 5022 MB
Subtitle
Title: Italiano Forced - Default - SUBRIP
Language: ita
Codec: SUBRIP
Default: Yes
Forced: Yes
External: No
Video
Title: Video 2160p - 4K - HEVC - HDR
Codec: HEVC
Profile: Main 10
Level: 150
Resolution: 3840x2160
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Interlaced: No
Framerate: 23.976025
Bitrate: 7401 kbps
Bit depth: 10 bit
Video range: HDR
Video range type: HDR10
DV title: DV Profile 8.1 (HDR10)
DV version major: 1
DV version minor: 0
DV profile: 8
DV level: 6
DV rpu preset flag: 1
DV el preset flag: 0
DV bl preset flag: 1
DV bl signal compatibility id: 1
Color space: bt2020nc
Color transfer: smpte2084
Color primaries: bt2020
Pixel format: yuv420p10le
Ref frames: 1
Audio
Title: Italiano AC-3 5.1 - Dolby Digital - Default
Language: ita
Codec: AC3
Layout: 5.1
Channels: 6 ch
Bitrate: 448 kbps
Sample rate: 48000 Hz
Default: Yes
Forced: No
External: No
Audio
Title: English AC-3 5.1 - Dolby Digital
Language: eng
Codec: AC3
Layout: 5.1
Channels: 6 ch
Bitrate: 640 kbps
Sample rate: 48000 Hz
Default: No
Forced: No
External: No
Subtitle
Title: English Forced - SUBRIP
Language: eng
Codec: SUBRIP
Default: No
Forced: No
External: No
Subtitle
Title: Italiano - SUBRIP
Language: ita
Codec: SUBRIP
Default: No
Forced: No
External: No
Subtitle
Title: English - SUBRIP
Language: eng
Codec: SUBRIP
Default: No
Forced: No
External: No
PS: I scrape my metadata from themoviedb.org in Kodi and then export that to an xml file of the same name, Jellyfin seems to find and use that.
Digging in a bit. It looks a bit different than I thought it did on my end.
I periodically use Kodi to backup my metadata to an NFO file. But I guess I forgot to script that and haven't actually done that in a while. When Kodi scrapes the metadata it preprends the mpaa value with the string MPAA Rated . I did this to make it more obvious if the rating was scraped correctly since I've seen kodi attempt to scrape before but then just record the value as null.
Inside Out didn't have an NFO that Jellyfin was reading from. But Jellyfin is set to scrape its own metadata from all avaliable sources. I just didn't enable it to write its own NFO file since I want the files that Kodi makes to take precidence and not be overwritten be Jellyfin. So for the case of insde out, it's pulling the correct rating without any changes. As seen in this desktop screenshot. https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/8add5606-1b0e-4dbc-8cb1-cd97595ec36d.jpeg
A Boy and His Dog, on the other hand does have a nfo from Kodi and it does have that MPAA rating on jellyfin with the prepended string as seen in this screenshot and in this bit from the nfo file.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<movie>
<title>A Boy and His Dog</title>
<originaltitle>A Boy and His Dog</originaltitle>
<ratings>
<rating name="themoviedb" max="10" default="true">
<value>6.300000</value>
<votes>309</votes>
</rating>
</ratings>
<userrating>0</userrating>
<top250>0</top250>
<outline>A young man and his telepathic dog wander a post-apocalyptic wasteland.</outline>
<plot>Set in the year 2024 in post-apocalyptic America, 18-year old Vic and his telepathic dog, Blood, are scavengers in the desolate wilderness ravaged by World War IV, where survivors must battle for food and shelter in the desert-like wasteland. Vic and Blood eke out a meager existence, foraging for food and fighting gangs of cutthroats.</plot>
<tagline>A rather kinky tale of survival.</tagline>
<runtime>90</runtime>
<thumb aspect="poster" preview="https://assets.fanart.tv/preview/movies/4917/movieposter/a-boy-and-his-dog-5e3fe50ad3787.jpg">https://assets.fanart.tv/fanart/movies/4917/movieposter/a-boy-and-his-dog-5e3fe50ad3787.jpg</thumb>
<mpaa>MPAA Rated R</mpaa>
Burning has a nfo file from Kodi. But the MPAA key is null in the NFO file. So there is no prepended string. However jellyfin still scraped the MPAA rating for it's self and correctly labeled it as seen in this screenshot and nfo. https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/e5783b64-6d6d-40ab-bdfa-2789a01d8a7c.jpeg
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<movie>
<title>Burning</title>
<originaltitle>버닝</originaltitle>
<ratings>
<rating name="themoviedb" max="10" default="true">
<value>7.400000</value>
<votes>1440</votes>
</rating>
</ratings>
<userrating>0</userrating>
<top250>0</top250>
<outline>Jong-su bumps into a girl who used to live in the same neighborhood, who asks him to look after her cat while she's on a trip to Africa. When back, she introduces Ben, a mysterious guy she met there, who confesses his secret hobby.</outline>
<plot>An aspiring writer goes to the airport to pick up a high school friend returning from a trip to Africa but is disheartened to see her with another man.</plot>
<tagline>The truth is all in your head.</tagline>
<runtime>148</runtime>
<thumb aspect="poster" preview="https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w500/kXiF80o74fE9gf3Utf9moAI7ar0.jpg">https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/kXiF80o74fE9gf3Utf9moAI7ar0.jpg</thumb>
<mpaa></mpaa>
So I guess I have 2 questions.
Does the string I put in the rating distort the recommendation system?
Does the recommendation system prioritize a local nfo file even if the value for the MPAA key is null when jellyfin actually has the correct rating in its cache?
OMG! This was driving me nuts yesterday and I thought it was because I had just rerun docker compose and couldn't figure it out. I ran a full recursive permission change on the jellyfin directory and reran the Ansible playbook and thought I fixed it. Turns out it just updated 10.9.6 when I reran the playbook, lmao
If they use semantic versioning, incrementing the last number means it's only a bugfix release, so the API shouldn't change. But as they say in their funding post, 10.10.0 will include API changes.
How can costs only be $600 / month. Do they not pay themselves? I guess that's admirable, but it doesn't set a good precedent. Will any young developers read this and internalize that they shouldn't ask for money? OSS maintainers deserve to get paid for their efforts.
Probably not worth the PR hit. There's at least tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars of development work in Jellyfin. (Sorry my order of magnitude isn't more precise.) Getting $2500 out of a developer budget may not be worth the accusations of being paid in hardware.
Not that I would complain, but I can see the logic. Imagine donating $200,000 worth of developer time and then being accused of doing it for the money because you got a $2100 laptop out of it.
I do wonder what the $300 was for. It's gotta be some kind of specific hardware component testing.
Totally agree, this honestly sounds a bit like putting principles before reason. Personally, I don't at all see why paying people for their work would make projects adhere any less to the "open source ethos", even though I hear this idea a lot. I think that in an ideal world, it should be possible to contribute to OSS projects full-time and make a living, financed by donations from dependants (including corporations) that profit off of the free software and have a vested interest in continued and rapid development of the project.
If you really don't want the money to reward contributors, why not pass it on to open-source dependencies of your project that are looking for funding? FOSS projects not scrambling for funding is pretty rare today unfortunately.
Oh for sure. I don't think anyone is arguing that they don't have the right to ask people to stop sending them money. But we can still criticize that position. I'm not sure they've thought through the message they are sending.
Yes completely agree. The cool thing about opencollective is the transparency - that should mean the core devs should be happy to pay themselves some money for their time. This is how projects sustain themselves IMHO.
Hard to believe, but there is still people out there doing thongs for fun or to make the world a better place.
Its very sad to think that all efforts shall be rewarded by money alone.
All the open source contributions I do, I do for free, just because I feel obliged to give back to the community, and I think its the right thing to do.
I don't condemn devs who want to make money out of open source, but I applause those who truly understand what is at the base of the concept of open source and are able to contribute for the fun or for the good of it.
I fully agree with everything you said. I too have contributed countless hours to open source for personal enjoyment or for the good of the community and never been paid a cent.
The thing I lament is this sense I've seen in some circles that accepting donations or getting paid is somehow shameful. That the mere act of being compensated somehow diminishes the contribution. You can be paid and do it for the love of coding and do it for the benefit of everyone.
Everyone has the right to refuse payment, and people who do's wishes need to be respected. And I don't know the beliefs of the Jellyfin devs. But to me, a post like this feeds into that vague feeling that being paid somehow makes your contributions less "pure" or "desirable", than if you're solely doing it for fun or selfless reasons.
It's my strong belief that for open source alternatives to truly take off and go toe to toe with big tech, there needs to be a robust funding model underpinning it. If we as a community even see accepting donations as somehow "lesser than", what chance do we have of ever getting there?
If I donate to a project or charity, o would not be happy of my money went to another project I didn't agree with. Especially when bad things could happen our of their control. It is all risk, no benefit. Advising donators to donate where its needed is better than using their donated funds.
If they donated to a client for a niche device and it turned out there was code in it that gobbled up peoples data without consent it would backfire horribly.
Or just let the users decide for themselve?
They are grown up enough to install a program. They are probably old enough to just take their money elsewhere and as the Jellyfin team asked to, donate to some other Jellyfin 3rd party dev.
The average person isn't going to delve into the nuance of open source project structure. If I wanted to support the jellyfin ecosystem, I would probably expect that donating to the jellyfin project is sufficient.
They mention in the post that they have a list of official clients you can choose to donate to.
So, if there’s a client you use every day and that you love, consider finding it’s author in our list of official clients, and sending them a little something instead (or too).
It would probably be helpful if they included a link to that list in the post, though it is just one click from the projects homepage, and made it clearer that the list does include at least some subset of third-party clients. Though it would also be reasonable to infer that from the quote.
Taking donations for a specific purpose (developing jellyfin core) then spending it on something else (donations to other related projects) is something donors and tax authorities generally frown on
And take time away from jellyfin to administer it? Nah, let people donate to the client they use makes the most sense. They have a list of clients they like, why isn't that enough?
Jellyfin is such a great piece of software and I'm so glad the main project has the funds they need. I follow one of the lead android tv app developers and I'll absolutely plug him as a great place to send some donations. These people do enterprise grade work as a hobby and absolutely deserve a few of our dollars.
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