Honestly surprised it took this long. I guess it's less than ideal, since the wii doesn't support modern tv resolutions.

And that plex really pissed off the community by changing its pricing model.

I started out my home server journey with Plex but it just kept getting worse, forcing me to switch to Jellyfin, which imo works just as well and seems to not fall into the whole pay us to stream your media business practice yet. Paywalling such a core feature was pretty harsh

Can anyone comment on the security of Jellyfin? When I had last looked into it, it seemed like Jellyfin had a somewhat weak security model that made me question switching family members to it from Plex.

Plex could reverse this trend in a week if they decided to prioritize work on any feature that their core market actually wanted.

Intel ARC 380's are ideal at 4k realtime transcoded streams. And theyre cheap as well.

You could probably do a sticky round robin reverse proxy with a few backends doing transcode.

The biggest issue is bandwidth, but you probably knew that.

Agreed. I honestly chose Jellyfin over plex because I preferred the branding, not sure what I’m missing. I really enjoy Jellyfin, and thy seemingly have support for most devices in some way.

My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She’s non technical and hasn’t had any trouble once I gave her a login.

The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)

The one trick is to make sure your file naming & organization is good. They have good documentation on it. Everything's pretty much automatic then, almost zero further work. The naming conventions aren't too bad, and the resulting file tree would be a reasonable way to organize your files regardless.

I gave Jellyfin up and went back to upnp/dlna after the Android and iOS clients would keep losing sync, or wouldn't show me some season of a show, or would pick a white background on white text for a show.

The pain just kept adding up. It was quite nice most of the time. But every single time I reached for my phone, I was wondering how badly it was going to go. Quitting Jellyfin seemed like an excellent choice.

Upnp/dlna is much cruder; very direct raw BubbleUPnP client. But it works so well for me. Their transcoding server also is quite good and I can run it on any machine I want, isn't coupled to anything, can switch between them easily.

Bubbleupnp is also great because it lets me turn tablets into cast screens. I love that so much. Good general protocols rock; having media server, media renderer, then separate control points was a great model, good job UPnP.

Heh, I just spent 15 minutes debugging a Jellyfin bug where my WebOS client thought that the startup wizard had not been completed yet (I tried restarting it several times, but the thing that did the trick was enabling debug logging and _then_ it started working properly--probably a coincidence). Jellyfin is the best in class, but the bar is in hell. It can't be run in any kind of a high availability configuration, so if your only instance goes down or has any kind of issue, you have to jump on and fix it immediately or you can't use it. When something goes wrong, some of the logs show up in stderr, but most are just written as plain files to a directory. It's free software, so you get what you pay for, but it's pretty buggy.

For hardware acceleration you might be interested in the remote hardware acceleration strategy...

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/h...

The jellyfin DB itself is unfortunately sqlite instead of being DB agnostic. Maybe you could hack together something such that only one node handles writes and everyone else handles reads... if getting multiple cheap nodes gets your more bandwidth. I have to imagine that jellyfin fairly quickly stops being in charge of the media stream directly.

But yeah I think the transcoding and the size of your data pipe is the only "hard" part. The DB read/writes themselves are going to not be an issue (I think)

Yes, it was annoying, SQLite sucks as single source of truth for clusters, and it cost less than $100 to just buy hardware that can handle multiple high res transcoding sessions at once, but not 20 households' worth.

FWIW, I have managed 10 simultaneous live transcoded streams on a ARC B580 and it could have managed a few more. With couple of them you cold be fine.

The other aspect is you could share the media storage over NFS and have multiple jellyfin instances running for different houeshold groups.

With 2 or 3 nodes like that I think you could make it work.