Jellyfin 12.0 drops the '10' and finally treats books and comics as first-class citizens
Jellyfin 12.0, the open-source media server's new major release, abandons the '10' version prefix to signal true major updates. It rewrites playlist and collection storage for speed, extends alternate versions to episodes, and moves book and comic support into the core server, reading metadata from OPF and ComicInfo files. The Modern UI becomes the default, and search and recommendations become plugin-extensible. Upgraders must back up, use 10.11.x first, and expect a long initial scan.
If you maintain anything that parses Jellyfin version strings - a client, a monitoring check, a deployment script, a container tag pin - this is the item to look at before upgrading.
- doctoboggan
As a long time plex user with a lifetime pass, I always enjoy seeing the good progress with Jellyfin as it will increasingly give me a soft landing for when Plex finally does something to make me move. At the very least it will hopefully keep some of plex’s most user hostile behavior in check.
As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero, plus I got audiobook requests and subtitles working great. Granted a big part of the increased success was signing up for a Usenet service but of course Claude was able to configure it all and make it work. I was a little worried Claude would demur in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way
- bhaney
Upgrade experiences, anyone?
I have a ~40TB library and was still on 10.10.7 because of all the performance issues with 10.11. Upgraded straight to 12.0 and was impressed with how quick and painless it was! As the upgrade instructions warn about, some of my titles disappeared until a rescan added them back, but that was the only weirdness. The whole initial migration only took a few minutes.
- noisy_boy
Subtitles are the Achilles heel of Jellyfin (at least the Android client sending the stream to Chromecast stick connected to the TV). I can see the subtitle present but it doesn't show on the movie. Ok, I will just add manually - can't, progress indicator loops forever. Ok, I will remove the existing subtitles and add - removal succeeds - addition fails. This is the same fiddling everytime. If it works, it is a miracle. I used to forget about the subtitles and start the movie - you could just fix it on the fly right?! Nope, now I do full prep before calling everyone that the movie is good to go.
This is not coming from a bad place - I am very appreciative of having a open source alternative to Plex. Just putting this out there in case it catches someone's interest to improve it.
- hi_hi
I love jellyfin, been using it for years now, alongside the *ARR stack.
My young daughter recently started getting into audio books, so I installed Listenarr alongside a vibe coded mcp server [0] which I have running with all the other arr service mcp connections.
This allows the family to easily download and manage their media (err…Linux distributions) via Onyx AI, which I also have running with everything else on local box running microK8s, all on a relatively puny Geekom minipc with 16Gb
This whole setup is pretty straightforward to manage with Claude which has no issues working with K8s.
For those interested in the listenarr audiobook mcp:
[0] https://github.com/leachuk/listenarr-mcp/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
- rcarmo
I have a trifling complaint about this, which is that it smacks of LLM aid throughout, especially in headings. I wish people would aggressively filter for these things--I have a technical writing SKILL.md that tries to remove all the AI tropes it finds and use simplified technical English (it's a thing, look it up) to do docs, and that makes one heck of a difference...
- amiga386
I had to go back from 10.11.x to 10.10.7 because the performance was bad, but I'm very confident they've fixed all the performance problems with this 12.0 release.
I'm also confident they've found most of the bugs and have produced something you can just upgrade to, given they've had 7 release candidates over the past few months:
12.0 RC1 - Jun 22
12.0 RC2 - Jun 28
12.0 RC3 - Jul 22
12.0 RC4 - Aug 02
12.0 RC5 - Aug 11
12.0 RC6 - Aug 26
12.0 RC7 - Sep 01
12.0 - Sep 08
Overall it looks like a lot of solid testing has gone into this, I shouldn't have to go back to 10.10 again.
UPDATE: Upgraded to 12.0, performance is great, better than 10.10 and 10.11, including in third party apps! No problems with the migration.
- stanac
Not sure if they support multiple OPDS catalogs now.
I am on v10 (using JF for music only) and with book plugin (forgot which one) it didn't offer to split books into multiple catalogs, which was a bit annoying. Maybe I missed it in v11. Solution for me was to vibecode a simplest OPDS server with 0 css and basic auth.
- anygivnthursday
Jellyfin has worked great so far for us, I never used Plex or Emby so cant compare. They recently made an official Tizen app too, so dont have to build and sideload anymore, just works.
One of the remaining issues is that the Samsung client remuxes if you select a secondary audio track[0] - apparently fixable by using the AVPlay player instead of the HTML player.