Jellyfin has new versioning and AI code policies

The Jellyfin development team posted last week one of its "State of the Fin" blog posts that round up changes and upcoming releases in the Jellyfin ecosystem. This one includes announcements about changes to the Jellyfin versioning scheme and about AI code contributions.

What's happening at Jellyfin

It was a long State of the Fin, so here are the most important bits.

Burnout has increased: A central theme of the post was that Jellyfin's team of contributors are experiencing a lot of burnout thanks to an increase in pull requests, plus harassment from users. The post makes this ask:

Please remember Jellyfin is open source and is written by volunteers. There are real people doing the work, and they're doing this for the love of the project. Yelling at them/insulting them will not make anything happen faster, and is actually more likely to delay fixes or improvements.

The primary causes for the increase burnout are twofold:

• Jellyfin has grown in popularity, resulting in more users experiencing issues and requesting new features. These users are not as polite or patient as they could be.
• Code contributions from LLMs are coming in at overwhelming rates, and their quality varies a lot.

An AI policy is here: For that reason, Jellyfin has established a clear policy on code contributions generated by LLMs (so-called "AI"). Copying approaches by many other open source projects, use of "AI" agents isn't strictly forbidden, but you as a contributor must understand all of the code.

• They're also asking that when communicating you cannot simply pass off replies generated by an LLM as speaking for you.
• For details, read the full text of the AI policy.

curl is facing a new AI problem

Bug reports written by LLMs are coming in big waves, and they can’t just be dismissed as slop anymore.

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Versioning is changing: Starting with the next major release, Jellyfin will drop the 10. prefix of the versioning scheme. So while we're on Jellyfin server 10.11.10 right now, the next major release will be called Jellyfin 12.0.

• This is to avoid confusion about Jellyfin's development cycle. For context, Jellyfin has been at version 10.x.x since 2019, almost the beginning of its existence.

A major release is coming: While no target date was given, it sounds like Jellyfin 12.0 will be here soon, and you can try it now in the testing build.

• A lot of work has gone into optimizing performance, including querying databases.
• The notorious Schedules Direct compatibility issue has been resolved.
• If you have multiple versions of the same episode in a TV show, Jellyfin 12.0 will handle them correctly.

Work continues on clients: The Jellyfin desktop app is notably being rewritten as a Chromium Embedded Framework app, replacing its Qt base. The Android TV app's settings are being overhauled and enhanced, and the Roku app is getting a bunch of new features and tweak-able settings.

Zooming out

Why this announcement matters: Jellyfin might be the biggest name in free and open source streaming platforms. Its biggest direct competitor, Plex, just announced a huge price jump for its lifetime subscription program, making Jellyfin's always-free offer more appealing.

My take: I'm an avid Jellyfin fan, so I'm glad to see improvements coming, and I'm happy the strange 10.x.x versioning is going away. Still, a Ctrl+F of the blog post disappointingly didn't reveal any new SyncPlay support.

Diving in

Go further: There were a lot more details, especially on client development, in the official blog post.

Get it now: If you haven't tried Jellyfin yet, follow the official documentation on getting a server started.