The open source alternative to my sponsor

[DarkSwordsman]

Oh my lord... I shared this covnersation with another group of people I know.

@rlaphoenix I think you should calm down and get off this forum before you get banned here too LOL

Something ironic about a pirate banned from private trackers screaming about piracy.

https://gist.github.com/rlaPHOENiX/ebf71d2a35d433eda61affbf150e2299

[ToboRobot]

1 hour ago, Akti said:

Hey guys

 

I hate to be that guy but does anyone have a link to a, for lack of a better word, user friendly guide on how to set this up? dont get me wrong, what the video says is true, to set up the server, you only need a basic understanding of file systems. But from the way the whole thing was presented, i would have expected that i can indeed access my media remotely, as that is all everyone ever talks about when talking about these products.

 

I can follow a guide just fine but all the information i found so far basically suggests that "if i have to ask how to do that, good luck noob" which is a little disheartening after hearing that it is supposedly easy to setup.

Lots of video tutorials you can find if thats your thing, search for something like jellyfin ubuntu install on youtube for example

Setting jellyfin up on which OS?  The install process varies depending on what you are using.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/

 

[DarkSwordsman]

I see now. So apparently Emby's GPL version had paywalled features.

But what Emby failed to do was not include these paywalled features in their GPL codebase. So legally, the peeps who made the Jellyfin fork were able to just... undo the license checks and unlocked the features, which in this case, should be fully legal since the codebase was licensed under GPL.

 

This isn't a case of piracy. This is a case of the Emby developer being really, really silly.

[Akti]

26 minutes ago, ToboRobot said:

Lots of video tutorials you can find if thats your thing, search for something like jellyfin ubuntu install on youtube for example

Setting jellyfin up on which OS?  The install process varies depending on what you are using.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/
 

thank you. but yea, thats what i meant, those tutorials are above my level. id prefer windows. but it appears, this software is simply not made for users like me and i guess thats ok. maybe in a few years. ill check out plex till then.

[Needfuldoer]

I'm running Plex partly because I intend to use my NAS as a DVR, and it seemed like a gigantic pain in the butt to get guide data working in Jellyfin. Either it has to scrape XML data from some guide site, or you have to subscribe to some other guide site which costs more than a lifetime Plex Pass after only a few years.

  

12 minutes ago, DarkSwordsman said:

But what Emby failed to do was not include these paywalled features in their GPL codebase. So legally, the peeps who made the Jellyfin fork were able to just... undo the license checks and unlocked the features, which in this case, should be fully legal since the codebase was licensed under GPL.

IIRC there was a Subsonic fork (or patch) which did exactly that with their code.

 

Did the MATE project steal GNOME? No. Did CentOS steal RHEL? No. Did Jellyfin steal Emby? No.

[TannerMcCoolman]

1 hour ago, Takumidesh said:

Kodi is a fork of XBMC, basically every linux distribution is a fork of a fork of a fork.

Fun fact: Plex started as a Mac port of XMBC. It's sort of almost kinda a fork as well in that sense.

[Takumidesh]

13 minutes ago, TannerMcCoolman said:

Fun fact: Plex started as a Mac port of XMBC. It's sort of almost kinda a fork as well in that sense.

Did not know that!

 

Really shows how derivative software can be.

 

[ToboRobot]

1 hour ago, Akti said:

thank you. but yea, thats what i meant, those tutorials are above my level. id prefer windows. but it appears, this software is simply not made for users like me and i guess thats ok. maybe in a few years. ill check out plex till then.

Linus briefly showed how to do it on windows, it's pretty easy.  Install one app and it sets everything up, you just put movies in a folder and it works.

[UnicornsOnLSD]

This video was really good, very fair comparison between the two! Only other thing I would have liked to see was a section on music, partly because I develop a Jellyfin music client

[dogwitch]

i tried jelly for a month. it did not play well with modem for isp . what so ever.

no i cannot do a pass thru of device. what so ever.

plex works thru.

emby  i would like to try. but unless they have a trail pass. i wont.

[UnicornsOnLSD]

Also just thought I'd get in on the hilarious debate here

5 hours ago, rlaphoenix said:

Emby has had such shifting changes since their public commits including a completely revamped transcoding system and hardware transcoding system, dashboard monitoring system, fully integrated Skip Intro (no plugins), and much much more

I don't doubt that Emby has had user-facing improvements since it went closed source, but as a developer I see it as basically the same as Jellyfin still. In the initial development of Finamp, I used Emby's documentation to implement core features such as auth, library navigation, and serialising/deserialising data. This all... just worked in Jellyfin, and now that Jellyfin has better developer documentation, I can see that those bits basically haven't changed. Even their audio transcoding stuff is the same as far as I can see. I've been meaning to see if Finamp would work on an Emby server, and I'd be surprised if it didn't.

 

And, as everyone else has said, it's totally fine for Jellyfin to fork off Emby. If I made Finamp closed source tomorrow (which I doubt I could even do without all of the contributors agreeing), everyone has the right to take that final code and continue the app as free software. I made that decision when I picked the license for Finamp, as did Emby.

Edited January 31, 2023 by UnicornsOnLSD
Add extra note on Finamp-Emby compatibility

[UnicornsOnLSD]

27 minutes ago, dogwitch said:

i tried jelly for a month. it did not play well with modem for isp . what so ever.

no i cannot do a pass thru of device. what so ever.

plex works thru.

emby  i would like to try. but unless they have a trail pass. i wont.

If you mean port forwarding, there are fun alternative solutions. Personally, I use Tailscale (https://tailscale.com/) to talk to my server without needing to do port forwarding. You get the added benefit that you don't have to worry about your server being exposed to the whole internet, and traffic is encrypted without the need to mess around with HTTPS. Plex's proxies are nice and convenient though.

Edited January 31, 2023 by UnicornsOnLSD
Typo

[dogwitch]

33 minutes ago, UnicornsOnLSD said:

If you mean port forwarding, there are fun alternative solutions. Personally, I use Tailscale (https://tailscale.com/) to talk to my server without needing to do port forwarding. You get the added benefit that you don't have to worry about your server being exposed to the whole internet, and traffic is encrypted without the need to mess around with HTTPS. Plex's proxies are nice and convenient though.

its a Verizon  home internet cell box.

i would have mention port forwarding. if it had work.

 

[DarkSwordsman]

2 hours ago, UnicornsOnLSD said:

In the initial development of Finamp, I used...

Wait! You developed Finamp?! Nice! I've used it a few times, though I unfortunately just never got around to actually sorting music properly into my Jellyfin. Thanks for your work!

[Ginger Penguin]

I'd been meaning to give Jellyfin a try for a long time primarily because I was becoming maddened by Plex's lack of ability to force it to show files where I wanted them to be. As an example, putting specials of TV Shows in their proper place in the broadcast order rather than off in a separate specials season. Jellyfin has that solved in a satisfactory way. Its android app and a third party app for music playback Finamp seem to work pretty well both on and off the local network.

 

What I'm struggling with is the UI. Not only is it slower to load on both web and Android TV, it's less functional. For Android TV, lots of UI elements are generally way too large and there are too many clicks to get to the content you're looking for. Once the show you want is selected, you have to scroll down through the show description (which takes up almost the whole screen), options and Next Up before you get to the season selection. Then once I've selected the season and episode I want, I have to scroll again through the episode description to get to the play button. Contrast this with Plex, once you've selected the show you want, the first season will be highlighted by default but you can still read the description if you want and clicking the desired episode starts it playing. Plex also has an option where you can hide the season menu for single-season shows like miniseries. It still makes you click it twice for some reason that I've never been able to work out but I can't seem to find an option for this in Jellyfin's settings so it's another unnecessary layer for miniseries and one-off shows that aren't films.

 

The player is fine though, once again, I find the elements too large. Skipping playback is not able to be done with a single button press annoyingly. Pressing left or right will first bring up the timeline and transport buttons rather than just skipping back or forward. You can then skip back and forward as you please of course but you then have to press the select button and then click the timeline away or wait for it to disappear if you don't mind it being overlaid for a fair while. All in all, that's 4-5 button presses to quickly rewind something vs 1. It's nice to have the option to change the default skip values but that appears to be only on the web browser and not in the Android TV app. I really like the ability to adjust audio sync however if using the libVLC player something that's really bugged me about Plex not having because occasionally there are shows or films I have that are desynced for some reason. And having the ability to do negative sync is fantastic.

 

Now my biggest gripe. Everything has to go in a big list or sorted by genre. Depending on how much media you have, that could make it pretty difficult to find what you're looking for. Plex also has this issue to be fair but you can at least add collections and then hide the original items. While you can create collections in Jellyfin, for whatever reason, it only seems to add them to the Movies library. There is no Collections tab in TV shows. So I figured given that there is a genre tab, I'd be happy to manually curate the genres of my shows and go with that. The problem is, it ignores any custom genres you create. I want to keep my Panel Shows like QI separate from my Sitcoms like The Golden Girls and Sketch Shows like A Bit of Fry & Laurie. Navigating to the genre tab of the Shows library, there is no Panel Shows, Sitcoms or Sketch Shows entry despite those three shows being tagged as such. Also there is no way to batch edit shows so you can select all your Dramas and tag them, they have to be done individually. And on the Android TV interface, it appears that you can't set the Genre tab to be the default anyway like you can on the web browser and you have to scroll to the bottom and select genre every time.

 

So they appear to be both rather maddening. I intend to give Jellyfin and see just how bothered I am with just a big list only sorted alphabetically over time. I'll likely leave it running, however, at least for Finamp so I don't have to have my music stored on my phone all the time.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

7 hours ago, Takumidesh said:

Kodi is a fork of XBMC

Kodi is not a folk of XBMC at all.  Kodi is XBMC.  They just renamed it after it become available on far more platforms and 'Xbox Media Center' kinda didn't make any sense is a name.  But it's not a fork, they just changed the name,

[CerealExperimentsLain]

9 hours ago, rlaphoenix said:

Jellyfin started out as a fork of Emby's code with the license checks disabled.

Uhh.. Wait, what 'licenses' was a then open source piece of software 'checking' for?  Why did someone have to fork it to remove those license checks...?

[InsaneJester]

EMBY     That is all you need.   They do have all there own apps they give tons more features including downloading and transcoding.  Supports a lot of formats including DolbyVision HDR10 and HDR10+.   Loads of audio formats.  Been using it for 8 years now instead of plex.  Native apps for all types of devices even VR.  

[InsaneJester]

1 hour ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Uhh.. Wait, what 'licenses' was a then open source piece of software 'checking' for?  Why did someone have to fork it to remove those license checks...?

Thought it was looking like Emby.  Explains a lot that it was a fork from Emby.

[Squazzer]

For the downloads problems, it seems the issue is in transcoding.
Have anyone tried pre-transcoding the things one wants to download? And if so, does that make a difference?

[DarkSwordsman]

6 hours ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Uhh.. Wait, what 'licenses' was a then open source piece of software 'checking' for?  Why did someone have to fork it to remove those license checks...?

Basically: Emby has licenses and the software checked if they had a license. Emby was also completely GPL. So someone made a fork of it that just removed the license checks, which as far as I know is not illegal, since they're not circumventing the services provided, they are just modifying an open source GPL library. That fork later became Jellyfin.

[Needfuldoer]

6 hours ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Uhh.. Wait, what 'licenses' was a then open source piece of software 'checking' for?  Why did someone have to fork it to remove those license checks...?

They started locking features behind a paywall, kind of like shareware back in the day. Donating to the project got you an unlock code so you could use those features.

 

However, these paywalled features and the licensing system that hid them away were all open source, under a permissive license that lets anyone do just about anything they want with the code. So naturally, someone forked the entire project and patched out the checks that locked those features away, so anyone could use the paywalled features for free by using the fork instead of the official build.

 

That's what happens when you give all your code away under the GPL.

[Bramimond]

16 hours ago, rlaphoenix said:

Emby stopped being open source.

This is also why I not even considered Emby years ago when I decided to use Jellyfin to make family videos, audio recordings and photos easily accessible to my family.

 

I still would never use something that is closed source.

 

I did once in 2012, when I switched to Opera which had all these neat features. For example it had file hosting build into the browser, so you could just share large files with people and it was easy. You could also host your own website for free. They called it Opera Unity or something like that. Truly amazing.

 

But then they took it away and since it was closed source no once could fork it and it was lost forever. It was then that I swore to myself to never use closed software for things I care about ever again and I stuck to this.

[Lord Sexy]

There is a nice comment from /u/djbon2112/ on the subreddit. 
I just blasted the post when I got my Floatplane notification and it kinda blew up. 
Have a look what jellyfin fans think about that video

[ToboRobot]

11 hours ago, dogwitch said:

 it did not play well with modem for isp . what so ever.

no i cannot do a pass thru of device. what so ever.

plex works thru.

emby  i would like to try. but unless they have a trail pass. i wont.

Play well with modem for ISP?  What are you referring to/trying to do?