Eh, worked fine for us for a few years on our LG WebOS TV, but now we use Jellyfin because it’s a much better experience.

My LG WebOS TV has it, and it’s pretty old (8 years?). It works fine most of the time, but the TV has a habit of disconnecting from the WiFi, and if I launch Jellyfin when the WiFi is borked, Jellyfin forgets my server config, and I have to enter it again. It also doesn’t work with my HTTPS URL, so I have to connect it to the HTTP one.

I set up Jellyfin this year, so maybe the app just didn’t exist yet. I’d imagine newer WebOS TVs wouldn’t have at least the HTTPS issue, and may behave better WRT WiFi.

Yeah, I’d really rather not bother and just buy a quality product for a fair price.

Yup.

I didn’t do this all that much for a job, but I did work in IT tech support for a couple years and helped out w/ some decommissioning in a dev role, and I would usually put it on a higher setting. Why? Idk, why not? Best case scenario, I prevent a scandal from some really motivated attacker, worst case, I check on it and it’s not quite done, so I check on it later.

The PS5 controller should work out of the box on pretty much any Linux distribution, at least through Steam. If you have trouble, ask on [email protected].

And Jellyfin is a bit complex since you need to host the server, so don’t feel bad about that.

That can happen if you’re distracted accidentally shooting yourself in the back of the head twice.

And honestly, if you’re going to do a single pass, might as well do multiple. It doesn’t take any more of my time for 1 pass vs 7, assuming I only have a handful to do. I’ll probably just start one before I leave for the day, swap to another when I come in, and repeat until the pile is cleared.

If something is worth doing, and overdoing doesn’t take any extra effort, I’ll overdo it.

Windows is only intuitive because that’s what you have experience with. If you grew up on macOS or Linux, you would probably find it as confusing as you do Linux right now.

But yeah, it’s a learning curve, and self-hosting on Linux generally requires a mental shift from thinking of things as “apps” and moving to “clients” and “servers.” On Windows, the two tend to be mixed, because managing servers on Windows kinda sucks, but the opposite is true on Linux.

But yeah, do one thing at a time. Get comfy with Linux first, and then learn about self-hosting stuff (including Jellyfin).

Yup, I guess I just revel in disappointment.

Hmm, I haven’t used it much. Maybe I’ll take some time this holiday season to go bug squashing. I did a little of that with the Jerboa app here some time back, so maybe I’ll lend a hand here as well.

That said, I’ve only used it to show my collection to friends or test a new network tweak.

Right. It’s probably easier to give it a whitelist instead of a blocklist.

That’s too bad, but it sounds more like you bit off too much rather than Jellyfin being bad. Once it’s set up, it’s fairly smooth, we just drop movies in a folder on the NAS, name them somewhat appropriately, and Jellyfin frequently recognizes it, though sometimes I’ll need to help it out a bit. Setup wasn’t much more complicated than other self-hosted stuff I run, but I’m also a full-time Linux user for some 15 years and a SW dev by trade, so I guess I’m blind to issues I take for granted.

crashing on start

My main issue is that my TV occasionally decides to kill the network, which causes Jellyfin to crash on startup, clearing the server. It’s annoying, but I think the bigger problem is the TV, not Jellyfin.

I think the navigation is fine. I like the scroll by letter thing for movies on the right, and I don’t have so many TV shows that it’s an issue (maybe like 5-10 series? We don’t watch a ton of serials), and my kids seem to navigate it just fine. I did spend some time naming everything properly, so maybe that’s the difference? We rarely navigate though. My kids watch one show start to finish (however much time we give them), we generally watch one movie as a family and are done, and my SO uses it for exercise videos.

there used to be a secret menu for Roku where you could disable home screen ads

That’s the first link. If it no longer works, I guess Roku isn’t an option anymore. 😟

Right, but when I hear “able-bodied,” there’s a pretty strong implication that they’ll actually use that body for something productive. I think your average construction worker is more “able-bodied” than Tate, Tate just looks like a gym queen.

Model S… you’ll be really surprised what happens if you floor it

Honestly, I’ve almost never seen anyone in a Tesla floor it. Yeah, maybe once or twice when they first get it, but most dual motor Teslas I see drive pretty conservatively, probably because they want better mileage per charge or something.

Eh, I’ve seen the opposite. Most of the Tesla drivers in my area seem to drive relatively slowly. Yes, Teslas can go fast, but that burns through range like crazy, so I think a lot of them want that better range.

BMW drivers here are the worst because act completely entitled. They’ll cross multiple lanes on the highway w/o signaling, aggressively pass on the right just to slow down to the speed of traffic again, and they’ll park across multiple parking stalls. Audis are similar, but the demographics seem to skew a bit older.

Here are the main demographics I tend to see in my area (Utah):

• wannabe cowboys - big lifted trucks
• rich “racers” - BMW, sports cars (mostly Corvettes here), etc
• entitled “family” types - huge SUVs (esp. Cadillac Escalade)
• “outdoorsy” people (and wannabe “outdoorsy” people) - Subaru
• wannabe “green” people - Tesla, Rivian, etc
• actual green people - Chevy Bolt, Toyota Prius

The first three drive super aggressively, the fourth can vary, the fifth drives pretty normal, and the last tend to drive pretty conservatively. At least that’s my read from my area.

You admit that you’re “missing a ton of stuff” after listing a couple of features

No, I was curious what I was missing, so I looked for a comparison between the two. I’m not “contradicting myself,” I’m trying to compare the merits of both so I’m fair, despite not ever using Plex.

Jellyfin was the first one I tried, and it did everything I needed it to do. So I stuck with it. I heard about Plex and Emby, but I never got around to trying them. I did try Kodi years ago, but I didn’t like it at the time (mostly used it to get Netflix working on my Raspberry Pi connected to my dumb TV on my RetroPie box).

My argument is that I didn’t feel like Jellyfin was lacking anything once I got it set up. If this UX update pisses people off, try Jellyfin, because it does largely the same thing, and it being FOSS is also a pretty neat feature.

Awesome, I’ll check them out. :)

It being FOSS does not make up for it being severely lacking and features in comparison

It does for me. I apparently don’t need all those extra features because Jellyfin completely meets my expectations. I don’t even know what I’d want to add.

GIMP

GIMP is an exception. It’s usable (I made my wedding invitations using it), but you’re right, it’s pretty awful to use. There are tons of related software that’s pretty high quality, such as Krita (drawing) and Blender (3D modeling). I’m not sure why GIMP has such bad UX, but there’s still plenty of good stuff in the FOSS landscape.

That said, I’m not a FOSS purist, I just tend to prefer FOSS for things that I’ll be relying on for many years to come, and self-hosted platforms absolutely counts there. If I decide to bail from Jellyfin to something else, I know there will be a way to export my data, even if I have to build it myself. I don’t know much about Plex (maybe it’s easy to export too?), but if I don’t need the features, I’ll tend to stick w/ FOSS.

Here are some of the distinguishing features I see (looking at this site):

• hardware transcoding - I think Jellyfin supports it, and it’s an extra fee for Plex; not sure how “good” it is though since I don’t need it, it works fine on my devices
• app support - works on my TV, tablets, phones, and desktop; honestly, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d need it
• TV shows + DVR - looks like Jellyfin supports this, but I don’t watch live TV, so I have no use for this; maybe I’ll look into it at some point
• access more movies/TV shows - I’ll just get a streaming subscription to Netflix or something instead

I’m probably missing a ton though, and I’m guessing Plex has an overall smoother experience. But Jellyfin has been fine so far, so I haven’t had any reason to try others. I only want it for playing my ripped DVD and Blu-ray collection, and it works well for that.