Noticed that Jellyfin had inched out Plex when sorting by popularity on the TrueNAS app catalogue the other day (45,178 installs vs Plex's 42,225). The existance of this project seems to confirm that the dev ecosystem around it is getting stronger!
When I had to decide between Plex and Jellyfin, I noticed that with Plex it was mandatory to have an account even when self-hosting (!) so I'm not sure whether it's better or worse than Jellyfin, I just didn't bother trying it out because of that.
You can disable transcoding in the server settings or at the user level. Your client device would have to support the file being directly played of course.
I love it mostly as well so far, the only sticking point on both my TVs is constantly having to re-enter my server IP address. It sticks around for a couple days, then it's gone again.
Yes, it was annoying, SQLite sucks as single source of truth for clusters, and it cost less than $100 to just buy hardware that can handle multiple high res transcoding sessions at once, but not 20 households' worth.
I only have an cpu with hardware acceleration that is used for transcoding and even that can handle a couple of streams transcoding simultaneously. The biggest thing is getting people to use clients that support direct play.
I love this kind of project. I am pretty sure the developer had a Wii console sitting around somewhere and thought about how to make it useful again. Wait, I have a PS2 sitting around somewhere…
You could probably have your Wii computer boot directly into Jellyfin using a startup shortcut with 'dolphin-emu -e WiiFin.dol', then switch out of the app to play Wii games using the better menu app.
Then you can your Wiimote for both media + gaming with out needing a keyboard / mouse.
I built a little Jellyfin plugin for KOReader [1] so I can access my books from my Kindle. Jellyfin proved really nice to work with (though there was some poorly documented auth stuff they were in the process of deprecating).
If anyone has been thinking of building something in the Jellyfin ecosystem, I very much recommend it.
Speak of the devil, I was just looking for something just like this earlier this week. I may have even have ran into this exact project, but it didn't have functioning playback until now. I have a spare CRT in my office that I use for some old consoles, and thought it would be neat to stream some 4:3 media onto it, but didn't want to bother with getting some client box and HDMI to composite converter. If this works well, it would solve that problem nicely.
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The biggest issue is bandwidth, but you probably knew that.
I'm wanting to set it up for around 20 households to share, and with transcoding that exceeds a single (cheap) node.
The other aspect is you could share the media storage over NFS and have multiple jellyfin instances running for different houeshold groups.
With 2 or 3 nodes like that I think you could make it work.
For your use case, deploying multiple instances would be the way to go.
Would be music-only, which is sometimes ideal for older devices.
You could probably have your Wii computer boot directly into Jellyfin using a startup shortcut with 'dolphin-emu -e WiiFin.dol', then switch out of the app to play Wii games using the better menu app.
Then you can your Wiimote for both media + gaming with out needing a keyboard / mouse.
If anyone has been thinking of building something in the Jellyfin ecosystem, I very much recommend it.
[1]: https://github.com/DeclanChidlow/KOReader-Jellyfin-Plugin/