We do all look at code, get immediately annoyed that it doesn’t just make sense. most of us at least have the wherewithal to stick with it and work on the engine as it sits :)

We went out for drinks one night after work. Upon stumbling back to the office, I remembered I had forgotten that I signed up to make a tool page to mange some data ingest. It was due first AM. I was three sheets to the wind. Fired up LAMP stack, took the samples and made an ingest function. Wired up a textbox, tested it and went home.

Next AM, I turned it in, there was a minor bug. No problem, I’ll just find the issue and they’ll be good to go.

cracked the scripts open…

I could read it. I could see what a lot of it did. I could NOT figure out what some of it was there for. I spent 30m trying to figure out what I was doing. it was only a couple hundred lines. It wasn’t even a copy/paste job. Eventually I ran out of time and just leaned into phpdump, and breakpoints to find the exact error. One function hit a bonefied php bug that caused the debug to go silent. large swaths of the code were unreachable due to essentially a couple of typos. The only reason it worked as well as it did was because their sample data was as simple as imaginable. I put on some Nine Inch Nails and just remade it in about 30 minutes (10m before it was absolutely needed)

I watched a team invent a new language to get around updating some eccentric code.

They could have sat down and commented it and made their changes

They could have refactored what was there.

They could have scrapped it and wrote fresh

Instead, they designed an entire natural language system so that non-programmers who were writing in XML could just write in English.

They ended up making so many required keywords as helpers that the non-programmers kept using the old system because the XML was easier for them work with.

Note: wasn’t my code, wasn’t my dept, when I heard the plan I went to check it out, the old system was functional but like C- work at best. At some point, they wrote a compiler for the new system.

Troll, PR company or just Sycophant , either way you’re BLOCKED BABY byes

Thanks for that, flirc might be worth my time to look.

I need some of those codecs to perform better, but I can probably stand up a more agile box than a Pi.

How? What is hard to navigate in Plex?

That last ui update was a open abomination and every plex forum out there was all over it, you can’t hide that by saying nuhhahhhh

Since you’re so enamored with plex and I’m quite versed on it, Let’s talk about the horrors of plex

They are collecting data on your and your friends, what you’re watching and what media you have. If the country or state you live and ever decide to go after pirates, they will absolutely hand that data over to whatever state wants it for a song.

Using plex is selling your self and your family out.

They have consistently removed features that people loved and used to focus on delivering you ad content and enshittifying the average experience until they pay. And how much are you paying to watch your own content? What other services could you be spending that on?

I assume you don’t know you can customize your home screen and menus? You can only have your own content showing if you want.

I assume you’re either shill for the company or an outright PR plant, that last ui change was pushed to put their content first. that’s BS. I had my stuff customized, I disabled their crap, they undid it again. My family had to have me go and dig through those tiny top menus on roku to find my own shares. The average person watching my stuff complained to me that i put ads in my stuff. that’s not by fucking accident, it’s a business decision to give me and mine worse content so they can make an extra buck off me. Every change they make is company first, every requrest we make is forums for user helpful change is years old.

The whole company is absolutely horrible and selfish.

I absolutely can. It has only improved since I’ve been using it, which is from the very start.

How about give me examples instead of just shilling. The people here are owed the truth, not your company first attitude.

had disagree, getting friends and family on your jellyfin isn’t that hard. There are jellyfin clients out there for most devices

nice argument you place there. meet my blocklist

Wait, you’re that same guy just shilling for plex aren’t you?

Oh my, go check that post history people, they’re either a PR plant or just trolling

Remote play you can’t unless you want to open your network up to the internet,

That’s absolutely wrong. You can remote proxy the same way they do, sure to the edge. you can open just the port and sandbox the container. There are ways.

and even then most TVs and devices don’t have a JellyFin app.

Almost every streaming device outside of TV’s are covered and many tv’s already support it. Every roku and android tv support it, along with most samsungs.

Tell me, are you guys getting paid by a plex PR firm or something, you all feel lots of ways about things with very little information and tons of white lies.

Their entire infrastructure required to do that proxy and caching is at most 10k a month. Thats a couple thousand users.

What you’re actually paying for is their research and development of all that add ridden content they’re trying to shove down your throat. Then selling your data, and selling you and your watchers ads.

That’s some really expensive peanuts you’re suggesting

Ohh! ohh! I have a wishlist!

1. Finish the DB upgrade. The search is unusable on large collections, as a matter of fact, why not just go MySQL/PG?
2. Protect ALL the endpoints if you’re not logged in.
3. Include 2FA on server/clients
4. Closed captioning still turns on in some clients if you have caption language->default instead of captions->default
5. Add a failed login file so we can use the actual fail2ban instead of the static one that’s included.
6. Release a full music api so we can control the playlist status from a client and preload the next song for crossfading without breaking the playlist.
7. Put in hooks to properly support elasticsearch
8. Clean up the plugin workflow, it’s confusing AF
9. Better playlist support. The only way to bulk create a playlist is to generate m3u, but once you generate m3u, the client is unable to manage it. Either make a clean bulk playlist editor or have the editors be able to import and delete the m3us.

It’s been a decade. That should be in JF by now.

Reverse proxy doesn’t fix their unprotected endpoints. It doesn’t give their clients 2fa, it doesn’t make their search work reasonably well or their music client be able to preload the next song.

They’re kind of stuck in a rut and are down to basic maintenance for releases

You can do all that on JF. Apps are def available on most things.

If you really wanted to try to complain about it, you should complain about security, search speed and subtitle support.

That’s all correct, but… we aren’t absolutely in the clear. JF could absolutely be forked, DB changes enacted, security added, but you also need all those client devs to come along.

It’s not quite like most Foss where a couple people could jump in and do a better job, JF has a LOT of moving parts supported by a number of individuals.

Neat idea, they don’t interfere with each other. Run both so that when plex finally fucks us over, we just stop using it.

highly recommend getting a pi or media computer

Been looking at this for years, Fam is absolutely refusing to use a keyboard in the living room. They’ll watch on their phones first. I can’t find a clear, easy solution to run a quality remote on a SFF pc. It’s like the decades old mediacenter hole that never gets filled.

Retailers don’t, but those $300 60" TVs cost manufacturers more than that in parts and shipping. They are 100% making up for it in LTV from your data, that’s why some are trying to make it impossible not to use them when not connected to the internet.

You can’t say their service hasn’t gotten worse though :)

I paid $75 USD, but they took my plugins, (pour one out for youtube on plex for my DanTDM obsessed kid back in the day) made my interface hard to navigate, try constantly to shove their own content down my (and my users) throats. Hey, remember when you used to have that sync feature that kept you up to date with a selection of titles, then you could use the client on your phone to serve to other phones even offline, god that was awesome with kids on vacation.

Just a little infrastructure…

First you’re going to need to run it in Docker, so you can make it RO to your FS, because by running it bare-metal, the first time there’s a hole in security, they’re going to be straight in your NAS, and JF is very lax on security with the stated reason that they don’t want people to rely on their security. (no client 2fa, no open support for fail2ban only their wish.com attempt at it, no closing off endpoints if you’re not logged in)

Then you’re going to need to install traeffik, caddy or npm, setup lets encrypt yourself. that needs a dns provider and a name.

You still have no facilities for device 2FA, Your logged out enpoints are still going to serve content. If any of the packages those endpoints use have a vulnerability, every JF server out there will be immediately vulnerable.

The whole point behind locking every action behind the login is so that you only have to worry about the surface area provided by the login.

Then the DB (and hence the search) is still going to be dog slow, the music app isn’t going to let you pre-load the next song in your client, don’t come at me with your 500 item movie/music collection and tell me it’s fast enough. There are no proper hooks for elasticsearch even if i wanted to do “a little setup of infrastructure”

I run Jellyfin because it’s the moral right thing to do and Plex will eventually enshitify enough for everyone to leave, but other than occasional bug fixes, they’re not in the same class of software.

I even considered rolling up my sleeves to help. I pulled the codebase down, That DB change has been in the hopper for years now, they outright refuse to go 2fa or change logging to support fail2ban. They’re just not willing to greenlight the architectural changes they need and they’re already fixing bugs.

God I hate their last UX change. It’s like they specifically designed the roku client to hide your own content and favor theirs, used to be one click into my library and everything was there.