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?
The 0.18 version of the AndroidTV client fixes the subtitle loading issue, and it offers trickplay (scrubbing with images) as an experimental feature you can turn on, assuming you’ve generated the trickplay images server-side.
If you add yourself to the Play Store beta for the app it should update to 0.18 right away, otherwise the rollout for it is in progress.
Any other issues? I hang out with the Jellyfin devs in their chatrooms, could relay issues to them.
Oh holy crap, you have no idea how happy I am to hear this.
I already signed up for beta access, haven’t gotten it yet, but hopefully tomorrow.
So yeah, trickplay doesn’t work at all either on browser or google-tv versions. Would be amazing if that worked!
Other issues? What drives me (and my wife!!) absolutely crazy is that jellyfin is absolutely “stupid” when it comes to remembering what we watched. Basically, it just makes up random nonsense. I’m in a show right now that has 6 seasons, watching S5E5. If we continue watching, S5E6 follows. Great! What do I see on the dashboard? S5E11. For a long time while in S4, it would always show random S6 episodes. We currently track our episode on a piece of paper I kid you not. It always says I already saw all episodes of a new season even though I never have. I never understand this, I’m a developer myself and THIS part cannot be that hard to get reasonably right, but apparently it is Just track in the DB which file has been shown, and until what timestamp, how hard can that be? I mean, there are MUCH more complicated things, like trickplay
Other issues… Selecting the correct language for both audio and subtitles! So for some reason, jellyfin always manages to select the exact wrong on both, even though in config I have english, english, english. Would be very nice if it were fixed.
Other issues… So hardware decoding worked at last install. I was on Ubuntu 24.04, used an installed version with .DEB. I upgraded to 24.10 which for some reason was not supported (only LTS is supported) so I needed to switch to docker out of necessity. Did that, and now hardware support doesn’t work anymore. It’s not a huge issue as my home server is a beast, but since I have a good video card, it would have been nice that it would. I checked logs, and I cannot find any actual reason why it failed, logs just say that it does. It would be nice, perhaps, if there is some test feature that can debug the hardware decoding and show in log what part exactly is failing.
Other… Loads of times, if I have a dvd or blueray rip, it’ll work fine in VLC, but absoultey not in jellyfin. Haven’t found a fix for that yet.
Other… Auto subtitle download doesn’t ever seem to work as far as I can see. I have a paid opensubtitle subscription, yet all movies and shows that are missing subtitles will only ever have it if I manually add them.
Other… On google tv client I cannot search by category! I can on the web client and on my mobile phone, but not on google-tv. This means I have to use my mobile phone to kind of go through the movies of a category, then find it on the TV which is weird and annoying. Would be a VERY nice one to have fixed.
I hope the devs will focus first on the basics. I don’t even care about fancies like dolby surround or anything like that as I don’t have the hardware for that (yet), I just want to watch video and be able to easily fix things where needed. Even trick play (while super nice if it would work!) is a luxury as far as I’m concerned, just make sure the basics work. Things like easy subtitle timing adjustment on google-tv would be much, much higher on my personal list.
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to yell at the devs, I know its an open source project and I would even happily donate to help out. I’m not arrrrrring because of money, I just really hate how all good movies and shows have disappeared from Netflix and the such. I’d pay 3-4 times the monthly subscription if it would mean I could see EVERYTHING, but nooooo, they just had to carve everything up again to try and maximize profit and have the ability to screw over the end user. I have invested significantly in my current setup to just be able to what what I want, when I want. Netflix didn’t want my money, so jellyfin shall have it.
Awesome work, Jellyfin devs!
Regarding subtitle downloads, I recommend using Bazarr to handle that. It will automatically sync the downloaded subtitles to the audio if you configure it to. Uses a bit more CPU when it does but I’m sure your server can handle it.
I have no issues with Jellyfin. Works well, subtitles are no problem. Hardware decode has never been an issue.
But Ubuntu has always sucked. Debian and docker for jellyfin has been pretty solid…
Ubuntu is pretty solid for a starter, or in my case, someone that has used Kubuntu for over 29 years in a row (with a few forrays into kde neon, mint, etc)