Selfhosted

I never used Plex. Up until my kids were born I used to just watch my videos on my desktop, but now I find myself watching on my phone and TV more often. My Jellyfin server has been super stable for the last 6 months or so running on a super low powered machine and external hard drive. The only issues I have is with movies with Dolby digital, they tend to get out of sync when scrubbing the timeline. I am assuming that is due to the lower power of the machine. But, I have a 400watt desktop with a 7th gen i7 and a pascal Quadro P1000 that I am planning on migrating to. Then adding a 20tb internal drive for storage. Hopefully that will resolve the small issues I have seen with it.

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.

One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there's Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!

Also the Android TV app is AWESOME!

What do you run Android TV on? Raspberry Pi? My cheapo solution has been to use an old Android phone that supports DP alt mode (USB-C to HDMI adapter) combined with a USB hub + generic air mouse/remote + customized launcher.

It actually works surprisingly well. I installed FCast on it, so it even works like a Chromecast. If I'm watching a video on my phone using Grayjay, I can just cast it to the phone and it will start playing automatically. The only thing stopping it from being perfect is that it can't turn the TV on automatically. As a plus, since the phone has a battery, it's always powered on so I don't have to wait for stuff to boot, and it uses relatively little power.

... but overall it's janky and finicky, and the OEM bloatware is probably spying on me, so I've been looking for alternatives that can match the good parts of this setup.

I don't like Raspberry Pis for this because they're overpriced. I have a couple that I could use for this, but I'm hoping to find a cheaper solution, and one that I can recommend to friends/family when they ask. (the Android phone I'm using cost me a total of $15 on ebay)

Can Jellyfin handle symlinks? That's all it would take to sell me at this point.

Although I have my issues with plex, jellyfin has its own problems:

• STILL can't clear out the TS transcoded files automatically. So if you watch a bunch of TV episodes on a weekend, your jellyfin container will run out of space and break.
• STILL can't handle subtitles properly. I swear, this must be jellyfin's Waterloo.
• jellyfin cannot demux 5.1 and present stereo sound on certain streams. I think this is a tooling issue. But it's low level enough that I can handle it manually with mkvtoolnix myself on the few cases it happens.

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.

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

anybody have a guide for an old laptop