Jellyfin 12.0

As a long time plex user with a lifetime pass, I always enjoy seeing the good progress with Jellyfin as it will increasingly give me a soft landing for when Plex finally does something to make me move. At the very least it will hopefully keep some of plex’s most user hostile behavior in check.

As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero, plus I got audiobook requests and subtitles working great. Granted a big part of the increased success was signing up for a Usenet service but of course Claude was able to configure it all and make it work. I was a little worried Claude would demur in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way

Interesting post about Jellyfin's finances (2024)

https://opencollective.com/jellyfin/updates/were-good-seriou...

We have quite a budget collected over the last 5 years, and while we're really happy to see so many in the Jellyfin community contribute to us, we want to ask you to stop! No, really. We don't actually need your money. At least, not here and now. We have over $24,000 in the bank, and with average monthly expenses of only ~$600, that's over 40 months (3.3 years) of runway! So, we have plenty of money for the near future ...

Subtitles are the Achilles heel of Jellyfin (at least the Android client sending the stream to Chromecast stick connected to the TV). I can see the subtitle present but it doesn't show on the movie. Ok, I will just add manually - can't, progress indicator loops forever. Ok, I will remove the existing subtitles and add - removal succeeds - addition fails. This is the same fiddling everytime. If it works, it is a miracle. I used to forget about the subtitles and start the movie - you could just fix it on the fly right?! Nope, now I do full prep before calling everyone that the movie is good to go.

This is not coming from a bad place - I am very appreciative of having a open source alternative to Plex. Just putting this out there in case it catches someone's interest to improve it.

Upgrade experiences, anyone?

I have a ~40TB library and was still on 10.10.7 because of all the performance issues with 10.11. Upgraded straight to 12.0 and was impressed with how quick and painless it was! As the upgrade instructions warn about, some of my titles disappeared until a rescan added them back, but that was the only weirdness. The whole initial migration only took a few minutes.

I had to go back from 10.11.x to 10.10.7 because the performance was bad, but I'm very confident they've fixed all the performance problems with this 12.0 release.

I'm also confident they've found most of the bugs and have produced something you can just upgrade to, given they've had 7 release candidates over the past few months:

   12.0 RC1 - Jun 22
   12.0 RC2 - Jun 28
   12.0 RC3 - Jul 22
   12.0 RC4 - Aug 02
   12.0 RC5 - Aug 11
   12.0 RC6 - Aug 26
   12.0 RC7 - Sep 01
   12.0     - Sep 08

Overall it looks like a lot of solid testing has gone into this, I shouldn't have to go back to 10.10 again.

UPDATE: Upgraded to 12.0, performance is great, better than 10.10 and 10.11, including in third party apps! No problems with the migration.

Their AI policy ( https://jellyfin.org/posts/state-of-the-fin-2026-05-24/#llma... )

AI use isn't completely forbidden in pull requests/code submissions, however you must understand HOW it does what it does, and any posts to a pull request/issue should be written by the user. You cannot function as a go-between between your AI and our questions/comments, just copy-pasting whatever the AI tells you

One of the more sensible ones.

I love jellyfin, been using it for years now, alongside the *ARR stack.

My young daughter recently started getting into audio books, so I installed Listenarr alongside a vibe coded mcp server [0] which I have running with all the other arr service mcp connections.

This allows the family to easily download and manage their media (err…Linux distributions) via Onyx AI, which I also have running with everything else on local box running microK8s, all on a relatively puny Geekom minipc with 16Gb

This whole setup is pretty straightforward to manage with Claude which has no issues working with K8s.

For those interested in the listenarr audiobook mcp: [0] https://github.com/leachuk/listenarr-mcp/blob/main/CLAUDE.md

Looking forward to this upgrade. I didn't know or think about using Jellyfin for books though. Are there any apps (on mobile or iPad) anyone would reccommend that could read the book list similar to iBooks?

Anyone have the live tv (via iptv not connecting a tuner with an antennae) working well with Apple TV?

Jellyfin works great for me. My only gripe is logging around library scanning being pretty difficult to interpret. I'd love to add a dedicated scanner log that focuses only on logs relating to scanning, which for me tends to be the trouble spot in these systems.

That said I very rarely would even need it, the last time I thought I did was when I had my under configured to not see R rated movies because of my kids, the logs were not clear that the movie was ever scanned so it was hard to realize.

As other have said the apps for devices is still the issue with Jellyfin.

For TV you pretty much have to use Kodi and all the decent theme require a surprising amount of other plug-ins to work...

Anyone know of a decent theme for Kodi that won't fall over next time it updates? I just need "Resume Watching", "Newly Added" and alphabetical lists.