Jellyfin just works.
Plex
There’s your problem. Here’s the solution: Kodi.
As someone who meticulously organises media… this was not a problem for either Plex or Jellyfin.
The one thing that gets both of them fucked up for some reason is Ghost Stories, even with the TVDB tag, which should make it a non-issue. Still, it’s easy to fix, on both platforms.
My media looks like this:
Movies: [decade][Title as it appears on TVDB] ([Year]) ([Special things like Directors Cut or whatever]) ([Resolution]).mkv
Shows (including anime): [Show Title][Show Title] S[season]E[episode] [Episode title].mkv
Music: [Artist]([Year]) [Album title][Track Number] [Track title].m4a
Oh, another issue you will run into, with shows, is “fan ordering.” A good one for this is Sword Art Online. Some very vocal fans hate that there’s a fourth season. They don’t actually hate the content of the fourth season, they just think it should be combined with the third season for whatever dumb ass reason people on the Internet get incensed about stupid shit. They tried to plead their case on the TVDB forums and got shot down. So if you go by their order, the latter half of the episodes won’t be named and won’t have descriptions. Then, whenever the fifth season comes out, if you try to call it the fourth season, it’ll get the titles and descriptions of the actual fourth season that’s out now. So you can’t do that.
If you’re having issues with TV shows, get an app called Rename My TV Series. It’s on Windows, it’s on Mac, and it’s on Linux. And it’s free. Or you could pirate FileBot, I guess. Or pay for it. I’m not your dad. But I’ll use free software over warez any day, as long as it does what I need. Why pirate when the free version does just as good? Just like Plex and Jellyfin, RMTVS uses TVDB, so you know your filenames will comply with your media server. And, if you’re on Plex (not sure about Jellyfin on this specific one), you can rename the seasons, so you could call Season 4 “Season 3, Part II” and everything will still work. However, I named my SAO seasons “Sword Art Online,” “Sword Art Online II”, “Sword Art Online: Alicization,” and “Sword Art Online: Alicization: War of Underworld.” It looks really cool, since that anime doesn’t use seasons, each season actually has a slightly different name for the show. (It’s probably, if we’re being that nit picky, several shows in one franchise, but that’s not how TVDB wants it, and Plex won’t let you do it that way, either.)
😑 how did you know that was one of my problem files
I used to have VLC as my media server (easier to setup than Plex or Jellyfin)
I have gotten pretty good at understanding what jellyfin wants from me. usually just english movie title (release year), and for tv series series title (release year) / season 1 / s1e1, s1e2, etc. be sure to check thetvdb ordering.
some shows have multiple orders, and jellyfin seems to randomly decide one fits better than another. had that recently with pokemon, which doesn’t have a fully mapped tvdb order at all. still managed to finagle it somehow, and now I’ve got literally 1337 episodes (not everything but also not nothing. I’m happy with it) sorted.
50 upvotes and yet half the comments here are “it worked for me OP must be using it wrong” and the other half are "Using Plex is worse than bombing Palestinian children "
The full lemmy exprience!
Amen 🙏
Oh you think bombing Palestinian children is wrong? Antisemite.
Eh, it’s a meme. If people interacted hopefully it gave them a chuckle if nothing else
Yo, stop fucking using Plex and switch to Jellyfin. I switched over months ago, and it just works.
Plex became the enemy when they forced their users into a subscription model. Support bullshit-free open-source software instead.
My grandparents cannot access jellyfin via vpn and it’s not safe to expose it to the web because the devs don’t take security seriously
I put mine behind a reverse proxy, like any sane person would. Configure an original sni and you are basically invisible. (Tls1.3, doh/dot make it even better, depending on your threat model, but most likely overkill)
While you are (probably?) correct, this is significantly beyond what is required to deploy Plex for a standard home server chump like me.
I’m using jellyfin and a few others, but am consciously putting off exposing these services to the web until I can learn enough about security to do so. Given life, this will probably take me the better part of a year…
you are right to be careful here. But it certainly is also not a “requirement to deploy jellyfin” either. It’s just a good practice to minimize attack surface, no matter what you expose. Unless it’s meant for the general public and advertised, then this makes little sense :-)
Also, most selfhosters have at best one IP to use. This helps with the one-IP-multiple-webservices problem anyway.
I use tailscale when I’m in these situations. It even works behind the most cursed CGNAT like starlink where it’s impossible to even port forward.
As long as your tunnel is running you just use the private IP address for your jellyfin machine and your parents will access it like it’s local.
Old people don’t understand mesh network vpns
Lol Plex.
Instead of memes maybe post the issue you are having so we can help? Plex is usually pretty great at importing media if you name it correctly.
Oh. Thanks, I wasn’t actually wanting help today. I just wanted to post memes to blow off some steam
Why the fuck are you (still) using plex at all?
Not OP, but I run plex over Jellyfin as for me plex is just better. Has better clients, looks better, better features. Jellyfin isn’t always the answer. Maybe if someone releases a apple TV app that is better then meh, I will spin my jellyfin server backup .
Yea, Jellyfin is far from perfect, and it’s what I use.
It’s a bit more work than it should be, like it loves to identify stuff as Asian if it doesn’t have a perfect match, sometimes with folders properly structured with year and IMDB ID.
I’m constantly having to fix metadata or even remove a specific movie, rescan, return the movie folder, rescan, and then it sees it right.
I’ve had to blow away my entire Jellyfin database multiple times this year because it just loses it’s mind and won’t properly identify something.
It’s what I use, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it is an incredible value, and it doesn’t phone home or any other nonsense.
For me I use Emby, not only because I found it first, but I can’t justify switching to Jellyfin because the UI is just too old-looking. I prefer curves
Rename things. Plex is very good at detecting stuff. The extra information in torrent filenames messes with it.
Yep. That’s how I spent my afternoon
Have you heard of our load and savior “Automatically renaming and organizing with sonarr and using symlinks to preserve the naming of the torrent downloads so you can seed without using twice as much storage”?
Sonarr makes a symlink from the torrent download folder to a new folder where it renames and reorganizes the file, but the pointer for that file and the file in the downloads folder point to the same file on your hdd so.you have two copies with different names but only one “file”. Now you have a perfectly organized media folder to feed into Plex while all of those files also live in your completed downloads folder with the original naming conventions. And it’s all automagic.
The one main thing that has stopped me from setting up Sonarr is that I want my media server and torrent server to be on two different machines. Can Sonarr handle symlinks or whatever over the network or something?
Currently, I manually add torrents to Qbittorrent on Server A, which downloads the file to the hard drive on Server A. When downloading has completed, I use SFTP to transfer the files to a much larger hard drive pool in Server B, which runs Jellyfin. Then I may use SSH to rename the files to something Jellyfin-friendly, if necessary. I end up with two copies of the files this way, but most likely eventually end up deleting the files from Server A when I need to free up space and decide to no longer seed them.
When I tried to have one server running both programs, having a lot of activity in Qbittorrent made Jellyfin move sluggishly. Running them on different servers like this allows them to not bottleneck each other at all, and they can run at full speed at all times. I could see myself using Sonarr if I can still keep those two main programs segregated to separate machines.
Yes that is absolutely something you can do. All you would need to do is set up a network share on the download box and then mount that share as a drive on the jellyfin box and then you should be able to do anything to it you would be able to do to folder sitting on its own hard drive. However, if you then use that to copy all the data to a second drive on the jellyfin system this leaves you hosting 2 copies of every file you want to see and manually renaming them over SSH or in a file explorer. But we can already access the download systems drives over the network right? So… Cant we just read all the data right off the download system over the network instead of storing two copies of it? You bet your ass we can…
What i would suggest is that you pick a single computer to be your storage system, and store ALL your data there. This will allow you to use sonarr to automatically create symlinks between the downloads and media folders, so that it can rename and organize your stuff for you without you doing anything, while also seeding the torrent in perpetuity and only using the data of a single copy of the file. For the same reason that you could use a network share to copy the data from the torrent box to the media server, you could also just use a network share to read all the data directly off a single storage box. At enterprise scale the storage is often an entirely seprate machine from the machine doing the compute, and the data all flows over network shares, allowing many compute servers to all access data from a single machine to prevent data duplication. I would strongly consider moving to a system where all your mass storage is centralized in one location, removing the need to duplicate production files across multiple machines (outside of the context of backups, which are a good thing). You can hook as many compute nodes as you want up to that single “Network attached storage” device and read the files off it to all those computers, none of which require more than a small ssd to run their os. This will give you twice as much storage on the storage node, becuase your not duplicating it on the jellyfin node.
All that being said, i am also going to assume your operating at a pretty small scale here and likely dont need very much compute, certainly not two computers worth. You should ABSOLUTELY be able to run jellyfin sonarr and qbittorrent off a single box that also acts as your NAS / central data storage location, without any performance issues, unless you have dozens of users or are transcoding like every single file your family is playing. On the jellyfin end, make sure you are set up to be direct playing the files at native resolution and not asking your server to trasncode them to another resolution, this uses lots of resources if you dont have a gpu or a intel cpu with quicksync. On the hardware side, what are you using? I run about 45 docker containers with no performance degradation and stream to up to 4 simultainous plex users WITH transcoding to lower the bitrate cuz my internet sucks and I do all that on a old 8th gen i5 i got out of the garbage. You should be able to get a used bussiness computer off ebay for 100 dollars that will run jellyfin and a sonarr stack with LOADS of overhead left, all on one device so you dont have to worry about network storage and getting bottlenecked by your networking equipment. If you tell me what it is running on i can maybe give you a better idea of if you have some kind of configuration issue, or its just antiquated hardware. But all this shit runs on a toaster. People use raspberry pis. I would imagine there is some kind of config issue leading to performance degradation.
As for performance, I doubt processing power has anything to do with the sluggishness issues I experienced. I figure the bottleneck was the hard drives. With both programs on the same machine, if Qbittorrent is constantly searching around the hard drive for the next bit to seed, when I go to play something with Jellyfin, that hard drive is going to take a longer time to find that file I want. I definitely noticed an increase in performance when I stopped torrenting to the same hard drive that was serving my media.
With that said, I doubt symlinks (even over the network or something) would actually fix that at all. Qbittorrent would still be actually reading off of my media server’s hard drives, limited by their speeds.
That makes sense. Ive got 25Mbps up and an array of 8 drives so i dont ever get anywhere close to being limited by the drive speed when seeding, ive got to set the upload limit well under what a single 7200rpm drive can saturate. I manage to get lots of torrents up to a pretty high ratio and keep a good ratio on all my private trackers with a 1.5 MB/s upload limiter though, so maybe you could just turn your limiter to… lets call it 20MB/s? A 7200 rpm drive should be able to do atleast 80MB/s, so if you just set a reasonable limit you will still be able to seed out more than your fair share of data without messing up your viewing experience. Then you can put all your drives in one pool in the storage server and de-duplicate everything.
Unless you are just REALLY into having the high score on seeding ratio, i am not sure allowing qbittorrent to saturate your hard drive bandwidth is necessary, although as a member of the community i greatly appreciate your efforts to seed so much data!
Yes. Just to add, not everything hard links for me due to files being seeded (and locked) straight after it’s done downloading, so later I go back and fix the bulk by entering the download folder and typing:
- To list files that weren’t hard linked:
cd /path/to/downloads/ find . -links 1 -type f | grep ".mp4$\|.mkv$" | sort > ../fixthese.txtAnd going through the list and either reimporting manually via *arr>Wanted>Import manually, or
- omitting certain shows from the command once you’re certain all the unlinked are unwanted extras with:
find . -links 1 -type f | grep ".mp4$\|.mkv$" | grep -vE "./(Band.Of.Brothers|The Boys|Westworld|.*\] (Attack On Titan|JoJo)|.*ample.mkv$)" | sort > ../fixthese.txt( “./(|…” covers most shows, “*] (|…” covers files starting with e.g. [Anime Time], and “.*ample.mkv$” covered my ‘sample’ and “Sample” videos)
Did you set the paths for your mounted folders in the docker appropriately? If you have the download folder and the media library mounted as distinct shares in the docker template it can break the links. I had to put the download and media library folders in the same mounted directory to make my links work.
I had /mnt/user/media/tv mounted to /tv And /mnt/user/media/downloads mounted to /downloads and had to change to so I just had /Mnt/user/media mounted to /media, with the download and media library folders both existing as subdirectories inside of /media to make them link properly. There is a faq on the sonarr reddit about this exact issue and it’s a common failure point.
Ah, thank you, but I run it as a service. Sonarr currently has /media/disk2/New for downloads and media/disk2/Shows for main shows.
If its running as a service on bare metal then the issue i described should not apply to you, as the files are all on the same harddrive as far as sonarr is concerned. I am by no means an expert on squashing config issues wrt this stuff, but there are people who know considerably more than me hanging out in the sonarr reddit who could probably help. Sorry to point your towards a corpo hell hole, but thats the place that I know where the people that actually know their shit and want to help are hanging out. Just reading the stickied FAQ sorted out all my issues and everything symlinks for me now.
Thank you for this comment - I have been content with just a torrent client and jellyfin for ages. All files are tossed into a television or movies folder across multiple drives, like MoviesDriveA and MoviesDriveB. It works but it’s a real pain sometimes and having everything just go to a simpler torrent downloads would be a great time saver.
I was amazed when I found it this was how you were supposed to do it, and also kinda mad about there being no way for me to go back and seed the thousands of torrents I had renamed to get them to play right with Plex imports. Oh well, you live and you learn. If you have any issues the sonarr subreddit has some great guides in the sticky section and fairly helpful users that should be able to get the symlink think sorted out. Noone tells you that’s how it’s supposed to be when you start, you kinda have to bump into the information when you get mad about this very problem.
Good luck! I bet you’ll be pretty happy with the drastic reduction in labor once you set it up
There’s a silver lining because for some reason qBit updated and I lost hundreds of torrents including for private trackers. So my old workflow of managing via moving torrent locations is broken anyhow. Time to just restart, get new torrents, manage them better, and try to manually reorganize files that don’t have a torrent file anymore. Thank you!!
Sonarr/radar will organize and rename the ones without torrents for you… Don’t do it manually. Just point them (sonarr/radarr) at the downloads folder as an import folder. Sonarr is for TV and radarr is for movies, if you didn’t know.
Yams.media
How’s that one for sharing with people?
cool thing is Jellyfin is free and you can switch right now
if you have android TV clients, give Wholfin a go, it’s a FOSS jellyfin client that looks and behaves like the Plex client, it’s fantastic and makes transitioning users over so much easier.
It’s not better at this.
You will also not find as good of a support of Jellyfin by many devices like Smart TVs, game consoles, etc. Also, it just doesn’t work as reliably in many ways, like identifying media, transcoding it and sorting it correctly. It is an alternative to Plex in the same way that Gimp is an alternative to Photoshop: Superior in terms of licensing, but not as an actual piece of software.
well since that “superior” piece of software isn’t working, I guess I’ll just keep my inferior software that actually does 🥱
Most of it comes down to the user. You need to be precise about naming and sorting media with all of these media libraries. With non-standard media - like fan edits, combined episodes and the likes - my usual shortcut is to place it in bonus feature of regular media.
I’ve been running plex since plex was a thing. Switched to jellyfin as soon as I heard about it, because plex kept getting worse. The advertisements and integrations to other services are shoved down your throat in plex, I just need a media library.
But facts are facts, plex is far superior when it comes to tagging, matching, and generally working with metadata. There isn’t even a filter in jellyfin for unmatched media, nor a duplicates filter. In plex I can very quickly narrow down issues by using those filters.
Neither have native metadata export, but there are associated extensions for both, and the one in plex grabs 70 data points. Jellyfin does 16 and it has to lock up my browser for 5 minutes to think about exporting that csv.
I use jellyfin all day for watching, but I still spin up a plex install when I make major additions to my library because it’s way, way superior.
You sound like a weird little fanboy.
well if your works so great then why don’t you show me who’s boss and lend it to OP since theirs doesn’t 🤣
What isn’t working? It’s usually pretty flawless for me as long as it’s not anime and that’s what shoko is for
The file structure it requires. It’s hard to pull off without breaking your torrents and after that it still will arbitrarily decide a file isn’t the type for the library you’re trying to import it into.
For a couple years I was getting around this by just keeping all my stuff in a single library and using the collections feature with all its options to make my own categories for standup, TV, and stolen YT videos. But today not even that lax of a setup could allow for some foreign films I wanted to add. It will just ignore movies or shows that it REALLY wants you to create an additional “other media” library for with no metadata
You could use hardlinks to link your files to your media library structure without touching the originally torrented files at all.
That’s what got me looking at Sonarr and Radarr. I’m not sure if I’d rather do that or switch to a different service
I doubt any other service will have an easier time with matching media.
Difficult? I just toss mine into a file labeled movies and a file labeled TV shows. I rarely ever have to correct names or anything. What are you doing differently that is causing this?
I eventually got around to that too. Part of the issue is that I’ve got some nonstandard versions of some of the films and shows. Plex can handle some wierd things now, like if a long film is bisected into two files. But if you have a show that has episodes combined into multiple files, that version won’t work. Or if a season has a name instead of a number, it might get skipped or just haphazardly combined with another season’s episodes.
But also some of my problem files are anime and Plex doesn’t want to count OVA’s as anything so I guess I gotta look into that other service Chronographs mentioned
I’ve always used radarr and sonarr to handle renaming stuff, but it’s still a pain. I’ve run into issues where Plex ignores the naming I’ve done in sonarr and just displays raw file names. It’s a pain. Hopefully jellyfin will be a little easier when I eventually switch
Strange I’ve never had an issue since setting up sonarr and radar a few years ago, I followed the trash guides and just copy pasted the naming scheme
I suspect that my issue is that Plex metadata assigned those shows/episodes names before I renamed them, and refused to rename/refresh for whatever reason. Usually it works without a hitch
Radarr seemed pretty clever but yeah those are a lot of work
Definitely not more work than symlinking everything by hand
Use emby bro, it doesn’t force a fascist folder hierchy on you.
Is that another hosting service? I told myself I was going to try Jellyfin next if I threw in the towel in this but I haven’t committed yet. I’ll look into it 👍
Jellyfin is based on emby. Jellyfin is great btw
But you MUST follow the folder structure rules or it won’t know what you have.
Yeah, jellyfin isn’t much better in that regard. I just have sonarr and radarr managing this.
Even if you don’t use them to download your media, you can still add your existing media and import everything, and have them organise it automatically. You pretty much only have to search for and add every show/movie you have manually, iirc.
Nice, alright I’ll add that to my options
My entire library is pirated, never had any issues apart from when ab fab was named as some Arabic horse show
I did have one of my mums shows get matched as some kind of giant tits hentai thing once. We both thought that was funny. and occasionally there’s multiple shows with the same name, but they are easy to fix.
overall I’ve never had any issues, most of the people who say they have trouble arent following the naming conventions and should really be running the arrs to make it easier.
I have zero issues. You can change the metadata of your obscure files if plex can’t pull the metadata on it’s own. Really no issues importing my 24 TB’s of media.
You can, if the file makes it into your library in the first place. You’ve never had it just ignore certain files?
I feel you on that. I also have random issues with stuff just not show up. Seems to happen with shows especially if it doesn’t like some seasons that have names that change the title of the show. Sometimes part of each season might show up marked as being in correct seasons, but missing chunks of episodes in each season. Also have it happen with movie series that I want to keep together in a folder for the series (but not be an issue for other stuff using similar series folder).
I don’t see it happen as often as I used to, but does still happen. Can sometimes force things by adding the specific movie/show season to the library as a source location.
No, not even Video_TS files. They all show up and I just fix the metadata if Plex can’t find it.
Fuck it, I’m redownloding most of my library. Going to go through these files with a comb until it likes them and if that doesn’t work I’m trying jellyfin
I couldn’t get jellyfin setup at all. Spend 3 days trying to setup docker and get my connection right, nothing worked. Hopefully they can fix those issues cause many of us have the same problem.
I wish you better luck if you don’t get plex working well.
Oh, that’s the first ill thing I’ve heard about. Noted and Thank you!
