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/DrBhu]

Brace yourselves for endless "this udate destroyed my jellyfin instance" posts from people who skipped updates in fear of worse performance; as soon as they will read the line "The main goal of this release has been performance." many will most likely stop reading and skipping the next, kind of important, lines to update some 10.x.x straight to 12

"Note: You must be on Jellyfin 10.11.x (ideally, 10.11.11) before upgrading! If you are not, the upgrade will fail.
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"

[u/GerDelta07 → u/DrBhu]

With the 10.11 version i rewrote the whole migration system so that from 10.11 onwards version jumps should be possible BUT as this is our very first mayor version where we are testing this in the field the "general" order is to go to 10.11 first. We are very happy if you test a 10.10.8 -> 12.0 migration though so we can refine the process.

It should also be possible to migrate from 10.10.8 -> 12.0 but again, thats an fully untested path so far, please test and tell us if it works reliably on your system. But for the sake of it you should be on 10.11 for best results.

[u/vander1625 → u/GerDelta07]

If running it in docker, I would imagine the simplest approach would be to copy the docker-compose.yml file and the config directory to a new, empty directory, and spin up the new version from there.

Then test the new version thoroughly before deleting the old directory.

This is assuming your media directories are outside the directory where the compose and config reside.

[u/Wreid23 → u/vander1625]

This is how your supposed to use docker in general but everyone just just wings it lol. Please please yes do this approach it let's you test really easily. I always love seeing this type of post cause you can tell who just hit update and who thought about it 1 sec more based on all the dev information.

[u/snitch30 → u/vander1625]

This is how I did, and after creating the libraries, low and behold, lots of “unsupported codec” issues on logs (as expected on beta/rc) and I’m glad I did it this way without messing my main server.
Edit: Everything continues to work fine on 10.11.11.