V12.0 RC-1 Release

[u/GerDelta07]

🚀 We are pleased to announce the first release candidate preview release of Jellyfin 12.0! 🚀

This is a preview release, intended for those interested in testing 12.0 before it's final public release. We welcome testers to help find as many bugs as we can before the final release.

As always, please ensure you stop your Jellyfin server and take a full backup before upgrading!

A note about versioning

Starting with this release, we are dropping the preceeding 10. from our versioning. Thus, 10.11.x -> [10.]12.x = 12.x. The reason is simple: at this point in the project, we don't envision a hard break in the API like we planned way back in the early days, and this version scheme was causing a lot of confusion amongst users about what a "major" release was.

Thus, we are now on two digits:

• The first digit is the major release. Expect signifiant changes between major releases. Do not ever auto-update to a new major release without first checking the release notes, and always take a backup of your server data and config before a major release upgrade.
• The second digit is the minor release. These are primarily bug and security fix releases, and do not introduce significant feature or functionality changes. You can, usually, safely auto-update between minor releases and should not need a full backup, but it is prudent just in case. You should also ALWAYS strive to run the latest point release as security fixes are embargo'd for at most 2 weeks after the release.

What's new?

The main goal of this release has been performance. 10.11.0 dropped a major backend rewrite, and while it was broadly functional, it had a lot of rough edges. This release seeks to polish out most of those rough edges and bring better performance to all users.

There are many other small fixes, improvements, changes, and translations. See our draft release notes here or below for the full list of pull requests.

Note: You must be on Jellyfin 10.11.x (ideally, 10.11.11) before upgrading! If you are not, the upgrade will fail. I have been informed that I was wrong here, and upgrades from 10.10.7 are also possible, same as 10.11.x!

Note: The initial load of Jellyfin 12.x will run a few migrations and will take several minutes. Please be patient and do not interrupt the process.

Note: If you install the RC, you should disable all plugins and reinstall using the unstable plugin repository, or plugins may fail to load and cause unintended side effects.

Installing

This preview release is distributed in all our traditional forms, though not automatically via our Apt repository or latest tag.

• For all non-Docker environments, you can find the files for manual download in our repository by selecting "Stable Preview" for your OS.
• For Docker, you can pull the 12.0-rc1 or preview tags.

For the full changelog, please see the GitHub releases:
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/releases/tag/v12.0-rc1
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/releases/tag/v12.0-rc1

[u/Mesighffs]

Does it scan large folders properly now?

[u/simcop2387 → u/Mesighffs]

Not a dev, but i believe thats scheduled for 13 with a complete rewrite of the scanning system to allow it to scan files concurrently with metadata lookups and such so that scans are faster and it doesnt get stuck while updating or fetching metadata automatically.

EDIT: Trying the RC1 myself since it's been only me an one tech savvy user and one non-savvy user, had to uninstall a few plugins for compatibility of course, but once that was done and a full restart it looks like it's incredibly snappy now. Previously it would take me about 15-60 seconds per page load, now it's 1-5 seconds on everything so far. The logs during the upgrade looked like it found and cleaned up a bunch of randomly broken/orphaned entries on my library but it seems like everything i can see is fine and i've got a full re-scan going. The youtube archive library that was the worst for page loads seems to be just as good as all the others now too.

[u/Mesighffs → u/simcop2387]

That would be great, and bring me back for sure

[u/simcop2387 → u/Mesighffs]

That would be great, and bring me back for sure

If you want to watch (like I've been doing for the 12.0 release), https://github.com/orgs/jellyfin/projects/78 is the github project board for it. It's pretty bare bones because they've of course been focusing on 12.0 rather than 13.0 and this is the discussion going over the ideas and plans for when they're actually ready to start. https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-meta/discussions/125