For anyone looking for Plex/Emby replacement, whose developments have gone astray.
For those unfamiliar, Jellyfin is a libre fork of Emby, which (similar to Plex) has gone closed-source, resorted fully to the freemium model, to the point where it’s literally not possible to use the free version, started including tremendous amounts of telemetry (mostly Plex).
And just on a basic level, it sounds a bit ridiculous to pay for software for media that you provide yourself hosted on the hardware that you provide yourself.
Anyway, the project is kind of in the early state, but the development is rather fast, just in the couple months that I’ve been using it a lot of things have been improved/introduced, most important for me being:
- iOS clients have been released
- pause/resume is now universal across all devices for the same user (i.e. start playing on one device, continue watching on another one from the moment you stopped)
There’s native support for Linux, macOS and Windows (why would you use those?) and Docker and Kubernetes images available.
Anyway, the developers are committed to keep the software libre forever, so that’s a nice thing :)
btw are we posting software recommendations here?
Nothing wrong with posting great software here, so long as it’s libre! It’s such a shame when a free software project goes astray. It’s the reason why I greatly prefer the GPL over BSD and MIT licenses. Glad to see a new project coming up to replace the other one.
aren’t there ways to go closed-source with GPL and BSD?
With BSD there are, but with the GPL, only the licensee can go proprietary. If they choose to do that however, all previous versions of their software remain GPL, and thus anyone can easily fork it and continue development as free software. It’s why I prefer GPL to BSD.