Is anyone successfully using Jellyfin?

E

ekingston

I installed Jellyfin about a month ago. The install was easy. It started no problem and setup was a breeze with the web UI. But it only picked up 60 of my 900+ movies in my movie collection (similar major problem with TV shows). I dug through the logs and did a bunch of google searches. Mostly they suggested disabling various things. No luck.

For reference, I pointed Jellyfin at the media library I originally setup for Plex and then switched to Emby. I follow the Emby (Kodi) naming and directory structure consistently. The only deviation is that the directories are read-only for the media server account. I don't want some accident with the media server to delete or change things.

At this point, unless someone can point out how to do it right without giving Jellyfin write access, I'm giving up.

Thanks for reading my rant.
 
I had it, deleted. but dont know if i can call it a success.
not every video was able to be used with gpu transcoding, but with cpu was everything fine but i see no reason to use cpu transcoding.
but it picked up everything i had and i had only few due to data loss i suffered. on linux ( proxmox container) every show was found, every movie was found.
I dont think Jellyfin needs your permission to write unless its cache ?
ekingston said:
At this point, unless someone can point out how to do it right without giving Jellyfin write access, I'm giving up.
Click to expand...
This is how i lost my whole 4TB of data but i pointed cache directory to my drive lol ...
Try to create directory for cache, give permissions and test it. but thats for cache.

ekingston said:
But it only picked up 60 of my 900+ movies in my movie collection (similar major problem with TV shows). I dug through the logs and did a bunch of google searches. Mostly they suggested disabling various things. No luck.
Click to expand...
What was needed to do ? can you put some options ?
 
GlitchyDot said:
What was needed to do ? can you put some options ?
Click to expand...
That's my problem. Other than getting it to actually add them to the library I've run out of what to do.

All my files are in .mkv or .mp4 containers with h.264, hevc, or mpeg4 video and aac, ac3, or mp3 audio. All the movies are in a handfull of folders and consistently named "movie name (year).ext" as per the naming standards for kodi, plex, and emby.

The jellyfin logs showed ffprobe being run on all the video files but most never showed up in the webui. I would post some specific examples but when I gave up (before posting here), I foolishly purged all of jellyfin (including data) from my system.

I didn't completely clean up the metadata in the media files but if I had to change the container or run ffmpeg to fix something (or resize) then I replaced the container metadata too (keeping name, year, collection, genre for movies and language for the audio and subtitle tracks).

I'll probably try jellyfin again in a year or two. See if it works then. I like the simplicity of the Jellyfin UI better than the ever increasing cruft in Emby.
 
I once tried jellyfin and it was unable to find ffmpeg/ffprobe (can't remember properly) and adjusting jellyfin config files by adding their full absolute path and then it started playing fine.
 
ekingston said:
But it only picked up 60 of my 900+ movies in my movie collection (similar major problem with TV shows)
Click to expand...

ekingston said:
That's my problem. Other than getting it to actually add them to the library I've run out of what to do.

All my files are in .mkv or .mp4 containers with h.264, hevc, or mpeg4 video and aac, ac3, or mp3 audio. All the movies are in a handfull of folders and consistently named "movie name (year).ext" as per the naming standards for kodi, plex, and emby
Click to expand...

So only that small part was shown in the library or library was with all of them but Jelly was not able to play majority of it ? If later case - removing gpu transcoding would solve the issue until you figure it out rest of it ( so using only cpu for transcoding )

ekingston said:
I didn't completely clean up the metadata in the media files but if I had to change the container or run ffmpeg to fix something (or resize) then I replaced the container metadata too (keeping name, year, collection, genre for movies and language for the audio and subtitle tracks).
Click to expand...
My metadata was wrong on some videos but i could update manually using The Movie Database (TMDb)
as this is used by Jelly so update things was not an issue as i used to go to website check id and put it to Jelly.

ekingston said:
I'll probably try jellyfin again in a year or two. See if it works then. I like the simplicity of the Jellyfin UI better than the ever increasing cruft in Emby.
Click to expand...
So you use FreeBSD as main OS and how did you installed Jelly ?
You can have Jelly installed and just play around with few videos but keep your main streaming app.
This is how i keep my videos:
Lets say tv series:
Falling skies - this is how my directory for 5 seasons.
Banshee - this is how my dir for 4 seasons. I dont put transcoding , resolution, year etc ... i see no reason. i keep it short. Each season contains its own dir.
Another thing is - cache for Jelly. I had few GB only so my Jelly used to crash as it was not enough of space for caching so maybe because you have so much of media - maybe just give extra space for caching ? - this is only a theory :)
 
I feel having media scrapping/etc should be done by the player; I have a generic NAS in-house and my TVs, computers, phones, even Xbox One have Kodi that reads the files from the NAS and does the scrapping on-device. I used to go all-out and rename folders to TVDB for good media info/banners, but nowadays I just shuffle-play some folders I add to queue :p

Kodi also handles the hardware-acceleration on-device instead of having a server guess at it (my main complaint with Plex about any mkvs with subs; straight to server transcode if your device wasn't a perfect high-end Plex client but instead the thousands of other devices that just happen to be able to run it :p)

Kodi supports FTP, NFS, SMB, webdav, and etc; I've done no-frills SMB (Windows right-click share) and FTP with vsftpd no problem.
 
GlitchyDot said:
So only that small part was shown in the library
Click to expand...
This. Only a small number of entries even showed up. Playback worked fine on the one I tested.

So you use FreeBSD as main OS and how did you installed Jelly ?
Click to expand...

I installed the package. Since I run Emby and they use the same ports, I stopped Emby during the initial setup of Jellyfin. Then I switched the ports Jellyfin binds to and restarted Emby to run them in parallel.

Another thing is - cache for Jelly.
Click to expand...
When I have time maybe I'll give it another try and figure out how to change this. I assume there's a setting. If not, the Jellyfin data (and install) were on a 1TB M.2 drive (80% free space) that also had the OS and other applications. Most data is on other drives. In the case of the media files, they are on a NAS using NFS.
 
I am using the Jellyfin server component on a FreeBSD 13-STABLE server without any problems, unless you count that some shows/movies required manually editing their information to display correctly - mostly due to filename errors. Everything works out of the box and almost all client scenarios work great. Server performance is not an issue, with 24 CPU cores (48 threads) available (old dual-Xeon E5-2690 v3 machine). I do not believe you will see satisfactory performance from a slow machine, though. Remember that transcoding is required in many situations and that happens on the server.

The one problem is my FreeBSD HTPC (FreeBSD 14-STABLE), where the Jellyfin Mediaplayer will not even start. No error messages, Jellyfin through a web browser works fine, but does not allow audio passthrough. I have no clue where to start looking for the problem.
 
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