alt Hacker NewsJellyfin founder Andrew leaves team
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I’m surprised people reach for plex, not sure what I’m missing - but a Jellyfin container set up has been fantastic for strictly at home usage (running on an old gaming PC).
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!
Great that it's peaceful.
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
I simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded, and thus I was not performing my duties to an acceptable degree, facing severe burnout, and risks to my mental health.
[...]
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
Please execute my ignorance. And this isn't an attack on anyone, just my own stupid limited understanding.
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.
Happy to see that it looks like a peaceful transition. I’m not currently a Jellyfin user, I tried it, but it didn’t seem capable of handling my library on my hardware. I’m sticking with Plex for now, but as they move more and more toward trying to be a streaming service instead of a media server, I’m hoping Jellyfin matures to the point where it’s viable when I need it.
There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch.
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.
I’m grateful for this team. Jellyfin is a great product. I’ve been using llm + Tailscale + Jellyfin to manage my media box and I couldn’t be more happy. I’ve got perfect metadata, perfect organization, and multimodal search on top of it. What a dream.
Huge fan of Jellyfin and the whole related stack, glad to see this is all peaceful.
Small plug to ask for help with the Apple TV App? Swiftfin is really rough but the best option. It’s quite terrible, never refreshes, overlapping text constantly. It could use some love.
Jellyfin is great for my needs, and I appreciate the effort that goes into it. Recently was having rendering issues doing HDR -> SDR tone mapping since I watch my content on a 2008 era Pioneer plasma display. I found that oddly enough while the server is pretty solid, the client experience is a bit hit or miss. I'm using the mpg-shim adapter, and I'm looking forward to them building a native app with better native render compositing.
Cool to see fellow Mohawk alum making the front page of HN. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors Joshua and team!
Note that the headline doesn't reflect the post. Here's the beginning:
> 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".
Big thank you for your work!
Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.
Reminder that you don't need a powerful transcoding server and engine - I have been running for years with simple WebDAV on my NAS, and Infuse as a comfortable client on all apple devices.
the fact that Jellyfin works as well as it does with a rotating cast of maintainers might be the strongest argument for open source I've seen this year
Appreciate your hard work over the years. Jellyfin is a great product that I have been self hosting for years. Wish you guys the best. Thank you.
The title here is burying the lede and should be updated to something like "Jellyfin founder, project leader and core contributer all leave the project".
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.
> Now here we are 7-and-a-half years later, and it's the #1 FLOSS media server
Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?
The three founders are all great people, but there is a gatekeeping issue within the project (I'm heavily involved, so this is a throwaway account).
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.
This UI is YUMMYYY
Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative!
[1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/