About Jellyfin
Jellyfin is a Free Software Media System that puts you in control of managing and streaming your media. It is an alternative to the proprietary Emby and Plex, to provide media from a dedicated server to end-user devices via multiple apps. Jellyfin is descended from Emby's 3.5.2 release and ported to the .NET Core framework to enable full cross-platform support. There are no strings attached, no premium licenses or features, and no hidden agendas: just a team who want to build something better and work together to achieve it. We welcome anyone who is interested in joining us in our quest!
Jellyfin seeks to continue development of the original Emby project with a Free Software ethos. It is committed to bringing all its users access to the best possible Media System, developed entirely by a community of volunteers who contribute code, documentation, translations, and support to the project.
You can find our main repository on GitHub as well as our organization page.
Why did you fork?
The Jellyfin project was started in early December 2018 primarily as a result of Emby's decision to take their next release (4.x) closed-source. Several members of the future Jellyfin team, including Joshua, Andrew, Vasily, and dkanada, were actively observing the Emby situation due to previously-reported GPL violations and a growing discontent with the Emby team for their practices and lack of respect for the FLOSS philosophy and ethos. These including the addition of a paywall for gratis users in an early 3.x release, the hiding/removal of client app and server code over several years, a lack of openness to community contributions, and various other reasons. Upon the announcement of the closed-source Emby 4 release, this group quickly gathered to fork as many repositories as (legally) possible and begin the process of renaming the project Jellyfin.
Since December 2018, the project has grown immensely, through several speedbumps and waves of activity, gaining contributors from around the world and of all skill levels and experiences, and we continue to advance the project as best as we can. We want to be the stewards of a truly FLOSS option in the video streaming space against Plex and Emby, and to remain a good proof of the power of Free and Open-Source software.
The Team
Core Team
The core team consists of those with merge permissions on the main Jellyfin repositories, and thus have the ultimate decision authority for contributions to the core Jellyfin server and web client. In addition, each member has various other roles and responsibilities as defined below.
| Person | Contact | Role(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Joshua Boniface | GitHub Matrix Email | Project Leader, Packaging, Releases, Finance, Infrastructure |
| Anthony Lavado | GitHub | Social Media, Outreach, Finance |
| Andrew Rabert | GitHub | Finance |
| Bond-009 | GitHub | Server |
| Claus Vium | GitHub | Server |
| Bill Thornton | GitHub | Web |
| Cody Robibero | GitHub | Server, Plugins |
| Niels van Velzen | GitHub | Clients |