Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative!

[1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/

It’s fantastic software - the cross platform applications are pretty useable. Don’t think we’ve even had any major issues over the last 4 years using it.

Many thanks to the builders and maintainers, hopefully Andrew can take some rest and know they help a lot of people!

Jellyfin is an amazing project, and works almost exactly how I want it to. By listing and playing my media without autoplaying trailers and other such stuff.

I imagine many here who've never tried it will be of the same mindset

[...]

We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand.

If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout", I've come across two more in the past week alone:

* Filebrowser (Mar 2026): https://hacdias.com/2026/03/11/filebrowser/

* axum-login / tower-sessions (last week): https://github.com/maxcountryman/axum-login/discussions/330

> Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday.

"Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".

I really don't like the idea of transcoding on demand. It has always created a janky experience on the client. I've been using a custom solution that runs everything through ffmpeg normalization as part of the media upload phase. Whenever a client wants to stream something we give them raw byte ranges directly from the block storage provider. In practice, this feels like flipping the channels on an analog tv. Every video starts and seeks nearly instantly.

I've long since given up on the dream of maintaining lossless master copies of everything just in case. Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate. When would you actually be able to use all of the available information? Why not just discard what you'll never use? I realize it feels offensive to kill information like this but you can do a much better job with the end experience if you do.

You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt. The code can run on anything slightly more powerful than a potato because you aren't transcoding at playback time anymore. A raspberry pi would be more than enough to serve a few clients on a LAN. If you remain humble in your list of demands (a simple directory browser that plays videos linked within), you can more easily achieve total autonomy.

Jellyfin is great project and good software when is working, unfortunately for me it doesn’t works very well. Constantly have issues with playback, files indexing and watch statuses that not marked, but that are small issues compred to the hell with subtitles. Very often out of sync (if they load)

So I switched to nova player and sharing my tv shows and music collection over SMB. It isn’t issueless, but at least more smooth amd leas complex.

Aren't JellyFin & Plex essentially just a catalog for your local data (most likely torrented movies, etc.) in a web app? If so, what's the big deal?

edit: ah, i missed the BIG transcoding part.

Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.

But periodically my system will refuse to see the Tailscale server, and I'll have to do some black magic tech operation like reinstalling to get it back.

Additionally, guiding a friend remotely through installing both Jellyfin and Tailscale is far more effort than saying, "Find Plex in your media sources."

It's not just Andrew [Rabert] leaving. This is an announcement by Joshua Boniface (the current project lead) and Anthony Lavado (a core contributor) announcing that they're leaving too.

Boniface's and Lavado's reasons are mostly akin to burnout, or the need for a family life, which I totally understand, especially as Boniface has been the face of the project for quite some time. I use Jellyfin daily, and I know exactly who Boniface is, I hadn't actually heard of Rabert, though I'm grateful for him founding the project. Boniface in particular has lead Jellyfin through huge levels of internal changes, bugfixes and improvements. It is throwing off the janky architecture of Emby, one part at a time.

Rabert's reasons are here: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/609

An obvious sore point is that Rabert has been AI-coding the Jellyfin desktop app, while the community (who bear the brunt of drive-by AI slop) have strongly opposed it. Even if he's a great coder and makes a wonderful desktop app with the aid of AI, that seems irreconcilable. Every wannabe contributor who shits up the project and wastes volunteers time with AI slop will say "you let that guy add his AI generated stuff, why not me?"

So he's leaving the Jellyfin project and he's going to rename his desktop app, to see if it stands on its own merits as a third-party Jellyfin client, rather than an official project. I wish the best of luck to him.

Even with that angle, it's true that the "Jellyfin community" (which includes all bug reporters, users on forums, etc.) can be very rude, directly to the contributors who may have inadvertantly added bugs. And Jellyfin is going through some growing pains, for example their 10.11.x series rewrote all the database handling to be a much better fit for the language (from raw SQL to .NET EF Core), which gives them a much more stable base to make changes upon, but it also had some performance regressions that rendered some third party Jellyfin apps unusable. (Those third parties' advice is not to upgrade). But at the same time, the project is getting there, supporting developers who are systematically fixing those regressions. The project has thousands of bug reports, but it also has thousands of fixes, and thousands of merged PRs. They are keeping up with the demand. I have every confidence Jellyfin 12.x will be great, and I'm looking forward to the new possibilities for plugins and enhancements it will open up.

Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?

The constant mocking accusations and hostility toward third-party clients, plugins, themes, and other tools have made Jellyfin's official spaces unbearable. The atmosphere often revolves around the opinions of a small group of people, and anything that falls outside their preferences will result in a ban.

There are two individuals are the primary drivers of this culture.