Good start
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Looks like the app has a good foundation but functionality is fairly simplistic. Thought I'd just give a few of my initial observations.
An all in one media manger is interesting & ambitious. I do wonder if a more focused scope would be more realistic. We have well established self hosted alternatives for music and video. I don't know that cardinal will have much success competing in those areas. Photos on the other hand is intriguing. I don't feel there are any self hosted photo applications that are truly great. Right now immich is probably the best but it has a long way to go.
Speaking of the photos app. Indexing is slow, really slow. One of my smaller collections, (36000 photos) is going to take 48 hours to index. 20 minutes in and less than 350 images have been indexed. This seems to be much slower than other products.
A folder view is desperately needed. Anyone serious about photography will have their photos organized. Not having a way to browse images as they've been organized really makes the photos application unusable. The timeline is a nice feature but additional control is needed.
I could go on and on with my wish list of features but I think attention to indexing & folder management would benefit the app most.
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I want to just say that while there are alternatives for self hosted video, most of them have major issues.
We all know that Plex has sold out to investors and is slowly moving away from focusing on the self hosted market. Major bugs and quality of life improvements go unnoticed on the forums for many years.
Jellyfin is great, but it has a lot of issues. The app slows to a crawl when doing your initial scan and has for years.
Development is extremely slow. Major issues with certain clients. Some clients don't exist. No shared vision. Just a bunch of guys working on random projects.
They don't even have consistent naming, i.e. swiftfin. Who is going to know that they gotta search Swiftfin and not Jellyfin? Most of my users are not very good with tech.
Jellyfin developers refuse to take money. While I appreciate them wanting to offer something truly free, it really makes me feel like it will always be on a volunteer basis.
I've also seen pull requests for requested features get closed because they want to do things themselves rather than work with the original dev to get it up to their standards. For example skip intro.
Emby is a great alternative and seems to be extremely stable with a lot of great clients. I tried to use Jellyfin for many years before I just recently caved and gave emby a shot.
The biggest problem is none of them besides Plex offer Watch Together. Jellyfin has SyncPlay but it's a buggy mess and does NOT work well at all. Jellyfin developers constantly say that the original dev left with no documentation and that they will not be taking ownership of the code or working on it.
Emby has plans for watch together. No idea when, but I do see that they are consistently adding features people want.
I think Cardinal Apps have a very good chance of doing extremely well in the market. Paid plans is important so Cardinal can be worked on full time.
A lot of us have money and are willing to throw it at someone that can make a very good all in one media server experience.
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@argyle said in Good start:
Looks like the app has a good foundation but functionality is fairly simplistic.
Thank you
@argyle said in Good start:
An all in one media manger is interesting & ambitious. I do wonder if a more focused scope would be more realistic.
Oh it's definitely ambitious. It was originally just going to be music, but I decided to include photos and cinema because all of the apps I use for these things seem to be getting worse, or are trying to lock me into financial subscriptions that I don't think are fair.
The way I see it, I've got another 50+ years of personal media management left in my lifetime. I can't even predict where we'll be at in 10 years but I know that I'll still be watching my old TV shows that will no longer available anywhere but on my own hard drive, so I'll need some good software to rely on. When I look at how other platforms are maturing, I feel compelled to build something that I can protect. The scope of work is necessary to prepare me for any future.
@argyle said in Good start:
We have well established self hosted alternatives for music and video. I don't know that cardinal will have much success competing in those areas. Photos on the other hand is intriguing. I don't feel there are any self hosted photo applications that are truly great.
I actually see it the other way around, and I think Cardinal will have a harder time competing in the photos space than music and movies/TV.
When it comes to photos, users expect mobile apps, photo editing, album sharing, object detection, 3d photos, drawing/annotations, filters, videos, photo bursts, and the list goes on. All things that are consuming because of the technical complexity. It's extremely difficult to compete against these features as a solo dev when Apple and Google have first dibs on everyone's photo library. Photos go way beyond self-hosting.
Music on the other hand has a smaller set of features and users are spread across mainly three platforms with many similar features: Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. I won't be able to offer Obama's Christmas playlist like Spotify can, but I think I can build a better desktop UI.
And movies/TV is even more consolidated than music. You get the same set of features across Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV, etc. I can build those features in a reasonable amount of time. The thing that sets movie/TV streaming services apart from each other is their content, something Cardinal doesn't have to worry about because users bring their own content.
@argyle said in Good start:
Speaking of the photos app. Indexing is slow, really slow. One of my smaller collections, (36000 photos) is going to take 48 hours to index. 20 minutes in and less than 350 images have been indexed. This seems to be much slower than other products.
This comes down to my development philosophy. When building a complex feature, I build the simple but unoptimized version first so that I can deliver value quicker. Once the basic version of a feature is stable, I begin iterating over it. Getting to use the apps with my own media keeps me motivated, and it allows for me to take user feedback into account when optimizing.
The initial photo indexing implementation is a synchronous operation. It's good enough to get photos into the Photos app so that I can build photos features and see things come together end-to-end, and maybe it'll be just good enough to interest new users.
But the optimizations are underway now. I'm currently working on a job system for the Home Server that will handle all of the long running tasks. The long part of photo indexing is creating the thumbnails, and if you enable the
DEBUG_INDEXINGenvironment variable, you'll see the exact amount of time it takes to create each thumbnail. It's like 98% of time spent indexing the photos.Soon, thumbnail creation and HEIC->JPEG conversion will be offloaded to background jobs, so that the file queue doesn't get held up. I know that nobody is going to be happy if they have to wait a few days for their photos to index before the server even gets to their music, so optimizations are going to come quickly.
@argyle said in Good start:
A folder view is desperately needed. Anyone serious about photography will have their photos organized. Not having a way to browse images as they've been organized really makes the photos application unusable. The timeline is a nice feature but additional control is needed.
Absolutely. It's a core feature that I need for myself as well, and it will be built soon.
@argyle said in Good start:
I could go on and on with my wish list of features but I think attention to indexing & folder management would benefit the app most.
Happy to hear more suggestions any time.
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@douglasparker said in Good start:
Jellyfin developers refuse to take money. While I appreciate them wanting to offer something truly free, it really makes me feel like it will always be on a volunteer basis.
This can be be such a touchy subject. There is nobility in building something great and giving it away for free, but it comes with some really big trade-offs. People have bills to pay and family to feed, and skilled developers will have to choose between working for free, or working for high paying tech companies. It's difficult to attract talent on open source projects. I've seen Jellyfin's "A Call for Developers" post and it highlights the difficulty of the situation.
@douglasparker said in Good start:
I've also seen pull requests for requested features get closed because they want to do things themselves rather than work with the original dev to get it up to their standards. For example skip intro.
:/
@douglasparker said in Good start:
The biggest problem is none of them besides Plex offer Watch Together.
I think I have some really great ideas for how remote watching should work. I don't want to over promise anything here but I'm really excited about this.
@douglasparker said in Good start:
I think Cardinal Apps have a very good chance of doing extremely well in the market. Paid plans is important so Cardinal can be worked on full time.
Thanks. I'm looking forward to growing things organically.
