Too bad there is no link to a forum post where the leavers explain why they are leaving in 2 short paragraphs each. Now we will never know...

Quoted below for those who don't want to open the web page.

Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday. We leave the project in the very capable hands of the remaining team who have been driving the project for many years now.

Joshua:

For me personally, it was just time for a change. I simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded, and thus I was not performing my duties to an acceptable degree, facing severe burnout, and risks to my mental health. It was time to step aside. Hand-off is ongoing and is amicable, and there is good communication lines, so there is little to no risk of a hostile fork or anything of that nature. Jellyfin will continue for a long time to come, just not with me at its head.

When I started Jellyfin, I thought it would be something used by a few hundred, or maybe if we were lucky, a few thousand, users. We might put a few pet features in, and do a bit of cleanup, but really, I didn't expect much. Now here we are 7-and-a-half years later, and it's the #1 FLOSS media server, a truly viable alternative to Plex for literally millions of server administrators and probably 10x that many individual users, and we've left our parent project completely in our dust. We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand.

I truly hope Jellyfin outlives me, and I trust those in the team to keep the philosophy and code alive.

For the last time, happy watching all!

Anthony:

My particular reasons are a bit different, so I figured I would post as well.

For myself, though I don't touch much code these days, I do a lot to manage things in the backend and with App Stores/etc. After 7.5 - nearly 8 - years, it's been a long time since I've been able to give much of my free time to Jellyfin. My life is changing and I've got other things that must take priority.

I am fully committed to a smooth transition, which is something I've wanted for a long time anyway. Even if the transition takes a year, I'm still down to do that. I want Jellyfin to succeed, and it should.

Glad to hear, the ones doing the work now will get more recognition and the one leaving can do more of what they want. Hopefully they had a good handoff.

Thank you.

We should celebrate these kinds of changes. Like its great that they've already achieved so much and not just that, but left behind a group of folks just as committed in the future of the project.

I always feel that posterity of your work beyond your own contribution is the real achievement and a sign of humility.

Slightly better "this happened weeks ago but we're just now getting around to updating everyone".

“Effective immediately.” = Hostile, forceful.

“Effective yesterday.” = Mysterious, invites questions, makes you sound like a time-traveler.

I'm just here for the violence.

What is o7?

Sounds like the rest of the team will continue so it should be similar? Seems like they just didn’t have the time anymore due to other life commitments.

The linked post is fairly positive. I'm not too worried - we're probably gonna see an uptick in user friendliness.

Jellyfin is written in C#.

I never understood why they don't support the subsonic protocol.

I mean... you might as well ask why the DLNA plugin has been broken for years. Or why they don't add a custom HTTP header to the client app so people can lock access in their reverse proxy.

As usual it's a mix of not enough developer manpower and "I don't use that so it's not a priority" i.e. the whimsies of FOSS.

Jelllyfin + Subfin (https://github.com/williamkray/subfin-plugin) works well, I've been using it with the OpenSubsonic Android apps listed in https://www.navidrome.org/apps/?platform=android&api=opensubsonic without issue. e.g. Substreamer, Tempus, Airdrome, etc. all work fine with Jellyfin + Subfin.

I'm guessing you're not on Android or iOS since Jellyfin has apps on those platforms - but you should be able to use any Subsonic/OpenSubsonic app once set up with the plugin.

What phone do you have that the jellyfin app and the jellyamp app are unavailable?

Edit: Also you can support subsonic with jellysub acting as a go-between. Considering its not a music-first solution, I'm not surprised that it doesn't support subsonic natively, personally.

Edit 2: Its unmaintained but works as of the last time I tried it out, fwiw. It isnt exactly a complex codebase either if something got tripped up by minor changes.

So to answer your question: OpenSubsonic is only for music, and Jellyfin does much more than music. Adopting OpenSubsonic would mean maintaining two APIs, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

Meanwhile Navidrome is adding Jellyfin API compatibility to get access to more clients :P