So I’ve been trying to use Jellyfin for a long, LONG time now, and I’ve never really been able to use it remotely reliable.
I can go on for a long time about all the problems I’ve faced, lets just say that after years I can still not use it to watch something with the family because there is always something not working, I could start about hardware decoding having worked for a while and then suddenly without explanation no longer working, but lets start with subtitles…
I just want to have subtitles actually load without having to sacrifice a goat to whatever god is out there to have subtitles work. What is the problem that subtitles just 99% of the time don’t work?
Worse, sometimes they work while watching a show, and a jellyfin update comes by and, you guessed it, subtitles no longer work for that show, even though they work for some other movies, sometimes…
I am a software engineer, I do loads of devops, I can find my way around, but jellyfin is just… I dunno what to do anymore. Is there a reliable alternative, perhaps, that actually just works?
I’ve long given up on the dream that I could have something similar to netflix for all my movies and shows that aren’t on netflix, where I can scrub with images, for example, I just want to be able to watch a show with the family with subtitles without fiddling for 30 minutes to try and get it to work.
Current setup is google-tv with 0.17.9 client, and the latest docker server. Shows seem to have okay subtitles on web client, but on google-tv, every time I select a subtitle, I get a “subtitles loading” message, and then 10-20 seconds later a “failed to load subtitles” message.
Anyone?
Is there a reliable alternative, perhaps, that actually just works?
To my knowledge, JellyFin is the reliable alternative (relatively speaking).
random unrequested armchair analysis of why home movie streaming is the way it is
While we all understand that volunteer labor on a free product isn’t going to be as feature complete as soon as paid labor on a paid product, JellyFin stands out as painful in the open source tool chain.
JellyFin is in a weird situation of adoption while relatively young, because the MPAA are doing excessive rent-seeking, causing folks to flee from the enshitifying streaming services.
It’s not good, all around. We’re really early to the part where the open source bit keeps improving while the paid thing enshitifies, because the folks who own the MPAA are raging sociopaths.
In a well regulated free market, the open source thing would have had a couple more decades to mature before non-FOSS-zealots started switching.
Also, JellyFin and tools upstream of it have an uphill battle against the MPAA and RIAA who don’t want us to own any media.
I’m not sure that explains anything, really.
As a very technical person (I cut my teeth doing fortran on a Sperry-Rand Univac system using punched cards several decades ago), Jellyfin is confounding even to me.
I’ve tried it with a perfect setup - clean new machine, nothing else on it at all, a small library, and clients on clean Windows, Android, and iOS (because I wanted to make it work). And I still had major problems, so much so that I gave up and went back to using VLC with shares, and built a small machine directly connected to my TV. Both of those work without a hitch. So “if it works with VLC” argument is wrong.
I appreciate everything the devs are trying to do, but it seems they let themselves get pulled around, instead of focusing on just make it work, first.
If it doesn’t work right with all test devices being clean/freshly reset then something is very wrong.
Notably absent from your setup is Linux. Did you try that for your server?
