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Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?
I'd like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.
Cheers!
Many ways to install it officially nowadays (see their website) but most do it via docker. A very easy albeit unoffical way is via flatpak.
If all you want is a local media server. It's very easy.
You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a "library" in the software.
You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.
Plex doesn't have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don't know about Jellyfin.
If you want to have external access it's a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I'm guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don't you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.
Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that's very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)
If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it's quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/
I knew basically nothing bout jellyfin except it existed and this thread inspired me to finally set up my own server and client on the tv cause the chromecast has just become so unbearably bad.
I had it up and running in 5 minutes. Hardest part was remembering the auth key while running between rooms. I don't buy into the atmos meme, for music I have bt amplifier or vinyl and it has everything I need: Watch content from my tv.
The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.
I’ve been running plex for a few years no. No real issues to complain of.
Until today. I just upgraded my server with an Intel ARC. Was looking forward to enabling qsv for streaming. Turns out you need plex pass to do that.
Can jellyfin do it?
I've had both for a while now, but I find that subtitle playback is a bit spotty in Jellyfin. Is that fixed, or have I missed a setting somewhere? The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so "Anime" comes before "Kaiju", and I truly can't stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus. Is there a way to customize the order of libraries?
Although I have my issues with plex, jellyfin has its own problems:
I used Plex a while ago and didn't like how I had to look for my folders against the stuff they offered. And the upside of being able to get my stuff from a server install on another network had me wondering if they were looking at the movies I had to pirate. Once I installed jellyfin, I didn't have to worry. My only issue is if I want to use it on vacation, I have to do some vps hack-jiggery.
Can Jellyfin handle symlinks? That's all it would take to sell me at this point.
One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there's Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!
In my experience, jellyfin seems to think everything is anime for some reason.
I've had to go in to every single TV series and manually enter Metadata.
Not a huge deal I only have a few series' but man it's weird.
You can also change the directories names, appending [MVDB ID], so that for the future if you ever happen to have to reinstall jellyfin, it'll automatically repopulate them how they were :)
It works pretty well for me but I separate anime and TV/movies, and make sure the anime library is only scraping data from anime-centric databases. But I'm also not watching too much new or obscure stuff.
I tried to switch from plex to jellyfin 2 months ago, running both at the same time in containers, but I removed jellyfin after a week
The main issue was the CPU usage, on idle Jellyfin was using about 1vcore while plex used only 0.3, no background tasks seemed to be running and after a week my 4tb of media should have been indexed
Also a feature that I use regularly with plexamp, starting a radio from a song, was not giving me good results on finamp