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[CerealExperimentsLain]

1 hour ago, Needfuldoer said:

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.

An open source project... With an attempt at paywalled features...?

 

Fuck that.

[Takumidesh]

16 hours 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.

There is literally an installer for windows.

Quote

1. Download the latest version.
2. Run the installer.
3. (Optional) When installing as a service (not recommended), pick the service account type.
4. If everything was completed successfully, Jellyfin is now running.
5. Open your browser at http://your_local_IP_address:8096 to finish setting up Jellyfin.

 

[dogwitch]

1 hour ago, ToboRobot said:

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

 

read prev post i made. i ref what type of connection i have.

[dogwitch]

double post glitch.

[maplepants]

Whether you're running Plex or Jellyfin, or just a DLNA fileshare, the best player app I've tried is Infuse.

 

if you're up to your eyeballs in the ecosystem, it's amazing. The Apple TV app is really nice, and downloads on iPad work flawlessly. I haven't tried to download a transcoded file so maybe that isn't as smooth.

 

I basically don't use the Plex client app anymore on devices where an Infuse app exists. But it's nice to have Plex as the server because they're the only option for PS4/PS5, or most smart TVs. 

 

I've got an Apple TV on my main TV. But I want to be able have my media in the guest room, or any old place. Part of what I feel like I'm paying Plex for is their effort to develop client apps for every platform they can possibly manage.

[Ultraforce]

20 hours ago, DarkSwordsman said:

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.

Bitwarden also includes their paywalled features in the GPL codebase and is smart about saying if someone wants to self host a bitwarden with Bitwarden premium features that's fine but you need to pay for premium or enterprise if you want to have us give support and help make sure everything works just right. Which for businesses is more then enough to spend money. Heck, I lost access to one of the admin panels because I didn't save properly a special key for it and since it's an unofficial version of bitwarden kind of stuck without it but I knew that coming into it.

[Takumidesh]

1 minute ago, Ultraforce said:

Bitwarden also includes their paywalled features in the GPL codebase and is smart about saying if someone wants to self host a bitwarden with Bitwarden premium features that's fine but you need to pay for premium or enterprise if you want to have us give support and help make sure everything works just right. Which for businesses is more then enough to spend money. Heck, I lost access to one of the admin panels because I didn't save properly a special key for it and since it's an unofficial version of bitwarden kind of stuck without it but I knew that coming into it.

This is the right way to do it imo.

 

there are tons of examples like this. A big one is fedora / red hat.

 

Fedora is the upstream provider for red hat. Red hat contributes primarily to fedora and wants to get their value back, so they created their own downstream distro, and charge for it, they provide support and additional features on top.

[jake9000]

To tack on to one of the things Linus pointed out, language preferences are also per episode for some ungodly reason. Every now and then I get a bad batch of files that makes me miss the good old days of just having my language pref apply to everything I open in mpc-hc.

No matter where you ride on subs vs dubs you will be annoyed by this misfeature.

[Takumidesh]

9 hours ago, jake9000 said:

To tack on to one of the things Linus pointed out, language preferences are also per episode for some ungodly reason. Every now and then I get a bad batch of files that makes me miss the good old days of just having my language pref apply to everything I open in mpc-hc.

No matter where you ride on subs vs dubs you will be annoyed by this misfeature.

Semi related, but a killer feature that would get me to switch to any platform immediately would be dual subtitles.

 

I live in a multi-lingual household and often have subtitles for a different language than I speak. Being able to have two subtitles at once would be amazing for me.

[1hitsong]

1 hour ago, Takumidesh said:

Semi related, but a killer feature that would get me to switch to any platform immediately would be dual subtitles.

 

I live in a multi-lingual household and often have subtitles for a different language than I speak. Being able to have two subtitles at once would be amazing for me.

That's a cool idea. I'll add it as an enhancement idea for the Roku client.

[ToboRobot]

21 hours ago, maplepants said:

Whether you're running Plex or Jellyfin, or just a DLNA fileshare, the best player app I've tried is Infuse.

 

if you're up to your eyeballs in the ecosystem, it's amazing. The Apple TV app is really nice, and downloads on iPad work flawlessly. I haven't tried to download a transcoded file so maybe that isn't as smooth.

 

I basically don't use the Plex client app anymore on devices where an Infuse app exists. But it's nice to have Plex as the server because they're the only option for PS4/PS5, or most smart TVs. 

 

I've got an Apple TV on my main TV. But I want to be able have my media in the guest room, or any old place. Part of what I feel like I'm paying Plex for is their effort to develop client apps for every platform they can possibly manage.

Yeah, it's a very nice UI.  I've just been using the Jellyfin client because it works well, despite not being feature complete.

What is everyone using for remote controls for media centres (especially with Linux support)?

Is there an open DIY project?

[1hitsong]

1 hour ago, Takumidesh said:

Semi related, but a killer feature that would get me to switch to any platform immediately would be dual subtitles.

 

I live in a multi-lingual household and often have subtitles for a different language than I speak. Being able to have two subtitles at once would be amazing for me.

Looks like someone has already been working on adding this to the web client: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/pull/3906

[Joshua Boniface]

Hi everyone, Joshua here, Jellyfin project leader, cofounder, and release manager.

 

Wanted to jump in to clarify a bit about the licensing and morality situation, timeline, and such. Because it comes up a LOT whenever a fan of Emby comes into the picture. So far @DarkSwordsman has covered a lot of it very well (thanks for that) but I figure there's always more to say.

 

First, a rough timeline was put together by Anthony a few years ago and is visible here: https://gist.github.com/anthonylavado/6f00b7590a8ff0467e86692266761410 The first thing to note is that the Emby folks did *not* write everything from scratch themselves. They were building off of another open-source (GPL'd) project, Media Browser, which long predated them. Now, I can't say for certain - though Luke from Emby claims - that all the code that was taken closed-source was rewritten. But even if I take their word for it, that's fine, that's within their rights under the license, just as a fork of their last GPL'd release codebase was within our rights.

 

So, let's talk GPL. The GPL license is explicitly copyleft. It has very specific, dare I say political, goals. One of those goals is that a user retains their 4 fundamental freedoms at all times, which include the freedom to modify the code for any reason, to publish those modifications (under the same license; this part is what separates the GPL from "permissing' FLOSS licenses like the BSD, MIT, and other licenses), and make their own releases of it. When you combine those freedoms in a particular way that includes changing the name, that is what the FLOSS community calls a "fork". Forks are incredibly common in the FLOSS world. They happen every day. There is nothing morally bankrupt about this, it is not "software piracy", or anything of the sort. It is literally baked into the software license itself as a right granted to the user.

 

So, on to the Emby-specific timeline. There is a discrete difference between "Emby Unlocked" and Jellyfin.

 

In early 2018, another developer who was only briefly associated with Jellyfin, discovered that Emby was violating the GPL and several other licenses within their codebase. This post gained a lot of traction, and has ("of course") since been deleted from the Emby repository (sketchy), but archive.org has this copy of it from December 25th 2018, just after our fork.

 

Also around late 2017/2018, Emby added their premium functionality. How this worked was, within the *GPL code*, there was a function that did a hit to an Emby license server to determine if a premium license was valid or not, and this function returned either True or False. The "Emby Unlocked" patch simply replaced this function with a "return True" unconditionally. As per the terms of the GPL, this is 100% allowed. It's also worth noting that creating this patch was inspired by Emby's attempts to add nagscreens before all video playback during this time, that would "encourage" users to go premium. This, coming from - at the time - an explicitly FLOSS application, obviously annoyed some people, including the author and myself, and though they later backtracked the patch was out there. This was the status quo for most of 2018. Note that this was, to my knowledge, never "released" as a binary. Anyone wanting to use it had to compile Emby from source themselves with the patch applied. Also note that this only affected the "premium" features that were actually part of the Emby GPL codebase; a large portion of these features were actually remotely hosted by Emby, so we had no ability to use those with the unlocked patch. Some people get the idea that this was a "license key generator" type hack, that let us use these features "for free"; it was not, it was simply removing this function and features from the FLOSS version of Emby.

 

In December 2018, Emby released version 3.6 beta (which later became 4.0) and explicitly refused to provide the source code as required by the GPL license. This issue, too, was deleted in very early 2019. At this time, several of us involved in this kerfuffle decided to fork the then-latest explicitly GPL'd version of Emby (3.5.2) into Jellyfin. The main discussion thread on this is visible here.

 

When forking, we decided to make use of an alternate codebase, that of another contributor who had been working on his own to port Emby 3.5.2 from Mono (the old, buggy, and not so nice Linux implementation of C#) to .NET Core, Microsoft's official and fairly new at-the-time cross-platform C# libraries. So already, even before we forked, our community was doing its own independent development work on the GPL codebase. This has only continued since. While in end-user appearance we may still "look" like Emby, the backend is, after over 4 years of development, radically different, to the point where several API endpoints are incompatible and a solid percentage of the codebase has been rewritten by Jellyfin contributors.

 

So, as this timeline hopefully establishes:

 

(1) We forked *after* it became explicitly clear that there would be no further GPL Emby releases. The fork was the "last resort" to keep a FLOSS Emby version going.

(2) We used the publicly available GPL-licensed Emby code from their own GitHub in our fork.

(3) Nothing was "stolen" or "pirated" from the now-closed-source Emby 4.0, only what was freely given under the GPL license.

(4) Our fork, even before it was Jellyfin, had its own independent development separate from Emby.

(5) We had no apps (these had been long-before taken closed source), so *all* client apps are fresh development by our community.

(6) "Emby Unlocked" was an independent effort from an associated party, which long-predated and was not a direct part of Jellyfin as a project (though we did, of course, remove all this "premium" stuff very early in our fork).

 

Edit: Fixed up the links.

[Takumidesh]

24 minutes ago, Joshua Boniface said:

Hi everyone, Joshua here, Jellyfin project leader, cofounder, and release manager.

 

Wanted to jump in to clarify a bit about the licensing and morality situation, timeline, and such. Because it comes up a LOT whenever a fan of Emby comes into the picture. So far @DarkSwordsman has covered a lot of it very well (thanks for that) but I figure there's always more to say.

 

First, a rough timeline was put together by Anthony a few years ago and is visible here: https://gist.github.com/anthonylavado/6f00b7590a8ff0467e86692266761410 The first thing to note is that the Emby folks did *not* write everything from scratch themselves. They were building off of another open-source (GPL'd) project, Media Browser, which long predated them. Now, I can't say for certain - though Luke from Emby claims - that all the code that was taken closed-source was rewritten. But even if I take their word for it, that's fine, that's within their rights under the license, just as a fork of their last GPL'd release codebase was within our rights.

 

So, let's talk GPL. The GPL license is explicitly copyleft. It has very specific, dare I say political, goals. One of those goals is that a user retains their 4 fundamental freedoms at all times, which include the freedom to modify the code for any reason, to publish those modifications (under the same license; this part is what separates the GPL from "permissing' FLOSS licenses like the BSD, MIT, and other licenses), and make their own releases of it. When you combine those freedoms in a particular way that includes changing the name, that is what the FLOSS community calls a "fork". Forks are incredibly common in the FLOSS world. They happen every day. There is nothing morally bankrupt about this, it is not "software piracy", or anything of the sort. It is literally baked into the software license itself as a right granted to the user.

 

So, on to the Emby-specific timeline. There is a discrete difference between "Emby Unlocked" and Jellyfin.

 

In early 2018, another developer who was only briefly associated with Jellyfin, discovered that Emby was violating the GPL and several other licenses within their codebase. This post gained a lot of traction, and has ("of course") since been deleted from the Emby repository (sketchy), but archive.org has this copy of it from December 25th 2018, just after our fork.

 

Also around late 2017/2018, Emby added their premium functionality. How this worked was, within the *GPL code*, there was a function that did a hit to an Emby license server to determine if a premium license was valid or not, and this function returned either True or False. The "Emby Unlocked" patch simply replaced this function with a "return True" unconditionally. As per the terms of the GPL, this is 100% allowed. It's also worth noting that creating this patch was inspired by Emby's attempts to add nagscreens before all video playback during this time, that would "encourage" users to go premium. This, coming from - at the time - an explicitly FLOSS application, obviously annoyed some people, including the author and myself, and though they later backtracked the patch was out there. This was the status quo for most of 2018. Note that this was, to my knowledge, never "released" as a binary. Anyone wanting to use it had to compile Emby from source themselves with the patch applied. Also note that this only affected the "premium" features that were actually part of the Emby GPL codebase; a large portion of these features were actually remotely hosted by Emby, so we had no ability to use those with the unlocked patch. Some people get the idea that this was a "license key generator" type hack, that let us use these features "for free"; it was not, it was simply removing this function and features from the FLOSS version of Emby.

 

In December 2018, Emby released version 3.6 beta (which later became 4.0) and explicitly refused to provide the source code as required by the GPL license. This issue, too, was deleted in very early 2019. At this time, several of us involved in this kerfuffle decided to fork the then-latest explicitly GPL'd version of Emby (3.5.2) into Jellyfin. The main discussion thread on this is visible here.

 

When forking, we decided to make use of an alternate codebase, that of another contributor who had been working on his own to port Emby 3.5.2 from Mono (the old, buggy, and not so nice Linux implementation of C#) to .NET Core, Microsoft's official and fairly new at-the-time cross-platform C# libraries. So already, even before we forked, our community was doing its own independent development work on the GPL codebase. This has only continued since. While in end-user appearance we may still "look" like Emby, the backend is, after over 4 years of development, radically different, to the point where several API endpoints are incompatible and a solid percentage of the codebase has been rewritten by Jellyfin contributors.

 

So, as this timeline hopefully establishes:

 

(1) We forked *after* it became explicitly clear that there would be no further GPL Emby releases. The fork was the "last resort" to keep a FLOSS Emby version going.

(2) We used the publicly available GPL-licensed Emby code from their own GitHub in our fork.

(3) Nothing was "stolen" or "pirated" from the now-closed-source Emby 4.0, only what was freely given under the GPL license.

(4) Our fork, even before it was Jellyfin, had its own independent development separate from Emby.

(5) We had no apps (these had been long-before taken closed source), so *all* client apps are fresh development by our community.

(6) "Emby Unlocked" was an independent effort from an associated party, which long-predated and was not a direct part of Jellyfin as a project (though we did, of course, remove all this "premium" stuff very early in our fork).

 

Edit: Fixed up the links.

WOW! great summary and it is good to hear some direct sources!

 

I think it is also important to note, that even if the intention was only to remove the license checks (though it has been thoroughly demonstrated that that is not the case), that an individual is well within their rights to do so.

 

I think often confusion comes from the strictness of a license like GPL, where many people perceive restrictive licenses as limiting (you cannot share, copy, redistribute, etc), GPL goes the entire opposite, creating a license that 'restricts the ability to restrict' so to speak.

[JEskandari]

funny I only just wanted a simple DLNA server and not Jellyfin nor plex , nor Emby or... worked for me , the only things I managed to use as a workable DLNA server were Mezzmo and Serviio.

Mezzmo was more polished but Serviio also did the job, everything else just didn't work or failed after several hours or day

[Bramimond]

On 2/1/2023 at 2:32 PM, Takumidesh said:

a killer feature that would get me to switch to any platform immediately would be dual subtitles.

You can use Jellyfin in a way as to use mpv for video playback and mpv has this feature.

[UnicornsOnLSD]

On 1/31/2023 at 4:12 AM, DarkSwordsman said:

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!

Thanks :)

[Zfollowup]

I am trying out jellyfin on my 40tb library after yet ANOTHER fucking issue with Plex and atmos. Plex is so close, but that last 10% is what I really need and its just not reliable enough. Its straight up embarrassing when I play something in plex and it stops for no reason, so hopefully Jellyfin can replace it. So far, VERY impressed with Swiftfin and about to try it in my theater.

[swimtome]

It's a year later and Plex has made no progress.  Just took a trip with a bunch of media 'downloaded' when it wasn't.

Also no playback speed control?!

 

Just sad...