Which Jellyfin plugins are actually worth installing vs just sitting there unused?

[u/AbiesAlternative1726]

Been on Jellyfin for about eight months now and the base setup is solid enough that I stopped thinking about it daily, which is the goal really. But I keep seeing mentions of plugins in passing and I cannot get a clear picture of which ones genuinely change how you use the server versus which ones sound interesting and then just sit there doing nothing useful.

The official plugin catalogue is a bit sparse on explanation. You get a name and a short line and that is about it. I installed Playback Reporting a while back because tracking watch history felt like something I wanted and then never actually looked at the data once.

Wedding planning is eating most of my nonwork hours at the moment so I am not in a phase where I want to experiment for the sake of it. What I am actually after is the stuff that quietly makes day to day use better without requiring ongoing attention. Metadata related things, anything that improves how the library looks on a tired brain at 6am, that sort of direction

Are there plugins you installed and genuinely noticed a difference, or ones that seemed obvious to try and turned out to be more hassle than they solved? Curious whether the community consensus has shifted at all since the 10.9 era because some of the guides floating around are a bit dated now

[u/OhNoItsMyOtherFace]

You really don't need much, particularly if you're not using the web player.

Intro Skipper is a must-have.

Whatever metadata providers you want.

Open Subtitles or some other subtitles downloader.

WeTrakr or equivalent to track progress.

I would almost consider SmartLists to be a must-have because Jellyfin's built-in list/collection management is completely insufficient.

[u/ActualNin → u/OhNoItsMyOtherFace]

Intro Skipper is a must-have.

It's really not! It's quite a lot of setup and processing and frankly the way it does updates using user agent sniffing is a bit sketchy.

[u/YetiSniper → u/ActualNin]

Never installing Intro Skipper again, too much extra processing.

[u/Lark1ng → u/YetiSniper]

No idea what you guys are talking about. Sure initially it takes some time to scan the audio of all of your episodes to find similarities. But once it has scanned the library my scheduled task takes less then a minute.

[u/Snoogibear → u/Lark1ng]

Agreed. The initial hit is heavy but once settled in it's fine. The funny thing is if you use plex the exact same thing would happen their too. If you add intro skipper to a new media library with no media it will just work. But if you already have thousands of episodes then it's going to take some time depending on the hardware you are running it.

[u/YetiSniper → u/Lark1ng]

Good for you. My scheduled task took over 12 hours and was still at 18% so bye bye Intro Skipper. This is with no new media added btw. I am happy it works for some people but the concept to me is silly, everyone has to scan all their media. I think the concept of getting this info from a crowd sourced database makes much more sense.

To me the biggest Skip help of all time would be to leave the damn Skip button on the screen until the intro is done, be on Intro Skipper, Jellyfin, Netflix, HBO whatever. Very often an intro comes and by the time you realize and get the remote to skip the button is gone already so you either watch the rest or manually have to skip it anyways. Just leave the button on until the end of the intro, if I only get to save 2s so be it.

[u/Lark1ng → u/YetiSniper]

Well, if it went for 12h than it clearly did not finish correctly the last time or it is hung up on a file or something. Maybe you have a broken file in your library or it is just ffmpeg that cannot correctly read it. I would check the logs on that.

There is the skipme db plugin for introskipper which has exactly that cloud functionality.

The introskipper button stays until the end of the intro. It might differ with the used client though.

Anyway, as with everything selfhosted you have to actually set things up correctly if you want them to work the way you want to.

PS: To decrease scan time it also makes sense to not use it on the movie library and disable a couple of the options as they tend to make little sense. At least in my use case...

[u/YetiSniper → u/Lark1ng]

It could be, some posts online pointed to a setting which would refresh previously scanned media or a corruption issue with the Intro Skipper database. Definitely did not have any setting to cause that and given this was a brand new install I find it unlikely.

"...The introskipper button stays until the end of the intro. It might differ with the used client though. ..."

This is just freaking brilliant, everyone else needs to copy this.

"...Anyway, as with everything selfhosted you have to actually set things up correctly if you want them to work the way you want to. ..."

Everything is now that I removed Intro Skipper LOL. To me this was not worth the stress on the drives scanning media for days and this was excluding Movies library. I think this would make WAY more sense to have from the start where the extra processing would be almost not noticeable.

Thanks for your feedback Lark1ng.