What's the Matter Daddy?

What we cover

• The Steam Machine pricing reveal and whether $1,049 is fair, considering all the supply chain constraints, the 8GB VRAM on the GPU, and the “4K ready” marketing that nobody’s buying. We also discuss SteamOS getting a broader “release” and whether it presents any advantages over Bazzite.
• Matter 1.6 and the joint Fabric spec — finally letting Google, Amazon, and Apple co-administer the same device network — plus the Open Home Foundation’s “proxy all the things” push to pull legacy RF and IR devices into Home Assistant without new hardware.
• Alex’s deep-dive review of 16 Jellyfin clients for tvOS: the contenders and not-so-good options, the criteria that separated them, and why AI-powered search has him genuinely excited. Also, we talk about Jellyfin’s version 12 RC1 release and the under-the-hood performance improvements that are coming, as well as how Jellyfin June is going and whether we should take a look at Emby.

First up, Valve finally put a price tag on the Steam Machine, and it landed at $1,049, which is higher than almost everyone was expecting. We go through the specs, the supply chain realities Valve was dealing with, the RAM lottery buyers might face, and the “4K ready” marketing claim that the benchmarks don’t really support. We also talk about the quiet win: a gaming console shipping with Linux as its default OS. Geoff also flags the LTT Linux challenge wrap-up, where even Linus himself came away more sold on Linux than expected.

Next, we cover the Matter 1.6 release, which finally allows multiple smart home ecosystems to co-administer the same device network rather than siloing everything behind individual hubs. Geoff unpacks what that actually means in practice, the difference between Matter over IP and Matter over Thread, and why the Open Home Foundation’s parallel push to bring IR, RF, and Bluetooth devices into Home Assistant as first-class citizens matters just as much as the spec itself. The panel remains cautiously optimistic about Matter’s long-term prospects, with the crew admitting they’ve been hearing “Matter is almost here” for years at this point.

Finally, Alex brings his exhaustive tvOS Jellyfin client review to the table: 16 clients tested, four strong contenders, and one that’s emerged as his clear favorite. We also touch on Jellyfin version 12 RC1, the one-way database migration you should snapshot before attempting, and the perennial Emby vs. Jellyfin debate, which the crew puts to bed pretty decisively.

Tags: Steam Machine, Valve, SteamOS, Linux gaming, Bazzite, Matter 1.6, joint Fabric, Home Assistant, Open Home Foundation, Jellyfin, Jellyfin clients, tvOS, Neptune, Emby, Plex

Links

• https://youtu.be/66QzlDewigE?si=ET1ZiWfcPIT7tFT9/
• https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/06/valve-upgraded-the-steamos-installation-image-to-the-big-steamos-3-8-release/
• https://steamdeckhq.com/news/valve-gives-green-light-to-install-steamos-on-desktop/
• https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2026/06/23/the-matter-upgrade-youve-been-waiting-for/
• https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/proxy-all-the-things-no-device-left-behind/
• https://csa-iot.org/newsroom/matter-1-6-enables-more-intuitive-setup-multi-ecosystem-experiences-and-context-driven-control/
• https://www.theverge.com/tech/896006/ikea-matter-thread-smart-home-problems
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP9uoA6PX8U

Transcript

Alex: This week, Valve announced pricing for the Steam Machine, the long-awaited Steam Machine. Hands up if the pricing was lower than you expected. Yeah, I didn’t think so, nobody. It’s unfortunately, as you probably know by listening to this, it’s over $1,000 for the entry. 00:00

Geoff: Little rough, but again, announcing a product in the current state of affairs of consumer electronics. Not something I would want to be doing. 00:19

Alex: Rumor has it that they wanted to get this thing in the sort of 750, 800 range, which I would have probably jumped on, to be honest with you. But now it’s $1,049 00:31

Adam: Thank you. 00:40

Alex: for the base model. And base here means 512 gigs of NVMe storage, 16 gigs of RAM only, and 8 gigs. This is the one that kills me. 8 gigs of VRAM. 00:40

Geoff: That was kind of known, but go ahead, Adam. 00:53

Adam: Yeah, I was going to say the exact same thing. It’s not like they changed the specs for the release to, to lower it because of price constraints and the issues going in the market. And I will say, I feel for Valve, I have actually been part of a recent product release and I’m going to be part of multiple more releases. It is not, it is not an easy time to play this game. So thank you, AI. Um, yeah. 00:55

Alex: So I wonder, right, LTT have been actually doing some great coverage of this this week. And one of the first videos of theirs that came out was, you know, the unboxing and then the review. And then the next one, predictably, was, I’m going to build a replacement machine from off-the-shelf parts for the same price. And, oh, look, isn’t it better? How long is the lead time on hardware builds like this? You know, is it, is it custom silicon? Do we know in the steam machine? Like what’s the sort of lead time here? Like, did they have to lock this build in six months, 12 months ago? 01:21

Adam: It’s semi custom. 01:54

Stephen: Yes. 01:56

Adam: So the, the GPU is a similar, a very similar spec to what, uh, is out in the market. I think the 6700 or 6900 something. One of those is very similar in spec. Um, as is the CPU, it’s basically a mobile CPU is my understanding, but they’ve combined these two little beasts together. And so semi custom, um, I 01:56

Alex: Yeah. 02:19

Adam: will tell you, they actually have been very clear that they have not only had challenges in They didn’t specify that it was the CPU slash GPU combo that was an issue, 02:20

Stephen: you 02:33

Adam: but they were very open and verbose about the fact that they are not able to source the parts effectively. That’s partially why they’ve gone to these lengths with the lottery system to block scalping and to help with that. But this was an interesting factoid. They are actually releasing these, and there is no guarantee that you will get two RAM sticks, even though it’s a dual channel setup. There will be some that come with a single DIMM and some that will come with the dual DIMM. And they’re just saying, did you want to get one? If you did, this was the best option. 02:33

Alex: Fingers crossed 03:11

Adam: Right? 03:13

Alex: that you get the single stick, right? 03:13

Adam: Right. 03:15

Geoff: No, you want the dual stick. 03:15

Stephen: No you don’t. 03:16

Geoff: No, you want the dual 03:16

Alex: No, 03:17

Geoff: stick. 03:17

Alex: because 03:17

Adam: Upgrade. 03:17

Stephen: No. 03:17

Alex: you can then go and buy one off of Facebook Marketplace or whatever 03:18

Adam: Yeah. 03:21

Alex: and shove it in without having to buy two 03:21

Adam: Correct. 03:23

Geoff: Okay, 03:23

Alex: and then 03:23

Geoff: fair. 03:23

Alex: sell 03:23

Geoff: But 03:23

Alex: the 03:23

Geoff: I 03:23

Alex: other 03:23

Geoff: mean, 03:23

Alex: one. 03:24

Geoff: there technically is a performance hit for not having dual channel with Ryzen. So technically you 03:24

Alex: No, 03:30

Geoff: want the du… 03:30

Alex: you’re missing what I’m saying. 03:31

Geoff: I know what you’re 03:33

Alex: I 03:33

Geoff: saying. 03:33

Alex: want them to send me a single stick because that leaves an open slot for me to go to the secondhand market and buy one for cheaper without having to do the resale dance. 03:33

Geoff: I mean, here’s actually an interesting question. Would it have made more sense for Valve to do like a Framework DIY package where they just sent you the box with no RAM, no hard drive? 03:44

Adam: Yeah, but it’s for gamers. It’s not for, it’s supposed to be an appliance, like a console. So the, I don’t think it follows the same sort of ethos that, that, you know, Framework kind of built their business upon. 03:58

Alex: But can we just take a moment to appreciate the fact that a gaming console, okay, it might be a little rough around the edges. The price might be a little higher than we would like. Can we just take a moment and appreciate the fact that a genuine gaming console is shipping with Linux 04:13

Adam: Mm-hmm. 04:32

Alex: as the OS? Can we just soak that up for a moment? 04:32

Geoff: Yeah, I mean, I honestly think it is a great package. It is, I like the form factor. I like the fact that they’ve done like the HDMI CEC stuff. Like they’ve done some really nice bits with it. The problem just is I already have a perfectly good home theater PC and I just keep looking at it and I’m like, there’s nothing really compelling for me to justify buying one of these versus like something like the Steam Frame. There absolutely is compelling reasons for me to want to maybe buy one of those. 04:36

Stephen: So Geoff, do you game on a big screen, like your big TV at home? 05:06

Geoff: i would like to and i have a setup to do it i just don’t always have time to do it but that’s more of me being a father and 05:14

Stephen: Okay. 05:21

Geoff: not having free time 05:22

Alex: no no no Geoff is too busy vibe coding 05:23

Adam: That’s 05:25

Stephen: True. 05:25

Geoff: okay 05:25

Adam: true. 05:25

Geoff: fine fine that too 05:26

Adam: 100%. 05:27

Stephen: Okay. Do you own a console, like a gaming console, Nintendo, whatever? 05:28

Geoff: my son has a switch 05:34

Stephen: Okay, if you’re going to go out, would you have to buy an Xbox 05:36

Stephen: for whatever you want to play? It could be a PlayStation. Just work with me here. 05:39

Geoff: I mean, yes, I would buy an Xbox or a PlayStation, but I really don’t have a compelling need to buy one. 05:44

Stephen: I understand, but you want it on your big screen. Maybe you don’t want to take the PC you have. The point I’m making here is that if you take the top end, like current Xbox that you can buy that gets pretty close to this hardware spec in performance, you’re paying pretty close to what Steam is asking. Except for on Steam you’re not locked into whatever garden they have forced you into you you have to use an Xbox Live account to be able to play with your friends and whatnot you have to same I’m pretty sure with Playstation it’s the same thing but then you’re still locked into to the ecosystem and you have to use their stuff with the steam situation i can use it as a desktop or I could install Windows don’t do onto your magic little box, right? And so is that worth a few hundred extra dollars to actually have a box that is useful outside of its lifespan of just gaming? 05:51

Alex: We have the PS5 Pro in the doc here at $899. Is that right? $900 for a PlayStation 5 these days? Yeah. 06:52

Geoff: Yep. 06:57

Stephen: Yeah. 06:57

Adam: Oh. 06:58

Geoff: The pro, 07:01

Stephen: That’s the 07:01

Geoff: the 07:01

Stephen: pro one. 07:02

Geoff: upgraded version that the normal one, I think, is still in the 500 ish 07:02

Adam: Console, 07:07

Geoff: range. 07:07

Stephen: Sure. 07:07

Adam: console, console. $800. That’s all I care. Yeah. 07:07

Stephen: Right. But then again, exactly. So if you want the one that’s close to the performance of the Steam Machine, you’re 07:10

Adam: Hmm. 07:18

Stephen: buying the better one. You’re not buying the one from seven years ago or whatever. And so, yes, the Steam Machine ended up being more expensive than what Valve wanted. But if you look at the benefits and if they have the games you want to play, honestly, I don’t think it’s that much extra to ask. 07:18

Alex: What about the controversy, and how much of this is internet manufactured nonsense, but the controversy that they market it as a 4K capable rig out of the box? 07:39

Geoff: Yeah. 07:51

Alex: From 07:51

Adam: That 07:51

Alex: the 07:51

Adam: bothers 07:51

Alex: benchmarks 07:51

Adam: me. 07:51

Alex: I’ve seen, it most definitely is not. 07:52

Adam: Yeah. 07:54

Geoff: Yeah. If they hadn’t said if they hadn’t said 4k, they said something like possible 07:54

Geoff: to play for or they kind of tweaked it a little bit more. But saying 4K ready was really a push because everything I’ve seen, it’s like most things are in the 30, 40 frames per second, even with like the frame gen and all that other stuff on to kind of boost frame, you know, frame rates. It’s not a 4K box. I mean, it can do it. but you really don’t want to be playing for it. Heck, 07:59

Alex: Yeah, I can run 08:21

Geoff: I have… 08:21

Alex: a marathon. 08:21

Geoff: Yeah, no, exactly. I have like a… So my current HTPC is my old 6700 XT, and that can barely do 4K. There’s no way a lesser power thing can do 4K. 08:23

Adam: You just passed the fact that he said he could run a marathon. And I’m going to call bullshit on that. I don’t think you’re running a marathon. Walk? 08:36

Stephen: No. 08:44

Adam: I’ll give you walk. But you’re 08:45

Alex: okay 08:47

Adam: not running 08:47

Alex: yeah 08:47

Adam: a marathon. 08:47

Alex: no running is beyond my capabilities yeah 08:48

Stephen: It’s about the same FPS. 08:53

Alex: footsteps per second 08:58

Stephen: Yeah. 08:59

Adam: There we go. 09:01

Geoff: I actually think the more interesting thing is the fact that they’ve announced that you can now install SteamOS on basic, I mean, I’m going to say basically anything, but I mean, right now it is limited to mostly AMD stuff. 09:02

Alex: That’s the kicker right there. That’s the kicker because I think many people, if you look at the market share and the Steam hardware surveys and stuff, many people have NVIDIA. And so that pushes us back towards a more general purpose distro like Bazzite, which I know you have a lot of experience with, Geoff. 09:14

Geoff: Yes. 09:31

Alex: I want that SteamOS goodness, though. So I’m hoping they’re going to provide a way to easily rebase SteamOS with an NVIDIA driver. I’m sure it will happen at some point. 09:32

Alex: I mean, it’s Linux. How hard can it be? 09:43

Geoff: Here’s my question, though. I don’t see the advantage of SteamOS over something like Bazzite. I get big picture mode. I get a desktop with Bazzite. I don’t see what SteamOS offers over something like Bazzite. Now, the HDMI CEC stuff, yes, but that’s a hardware thing that’s not necessarily a software thing. 09:46

Alex: Well, what difference does CacheyOS get you over Arch Linux? I mean, some people just like to run the 10:13

Geoff: Fair. 10:18

Alex: main event, the main thing. Some people like mainline, and I guess for them, SteamOS is the only route. 10:19

Adam: I think it’s, we’re thinking of it through our own lens guys. So this is supposed to be something that the general consumer will just buy and use. That’s like the magic to it is that everybody kind of benefits, Linux benefits, gaming on Linux benefits. Us as nerds benefit, but then also the normies can come in and have a perfectly functional experience on the thing out of the box. No muss, no fuss. It’s just like any other console that they would set up these days. 10:27

Alex: That’s it. The word Linux should, and I think Valve have largely achieved this on the deck, not enter anybody’s mind when they turn it on as a product. I could pick up my Steam Deck. I don’t really, I know it runs Linux on it because I’m a nerd, but there are plenty of people out there, I’m sure, that have bought Steam Decks over the years that have no clue. They couldn’t care less that it’s got Proton and all of this other amazing work that Valve have done. So if there is one argument to justify the price, it’s simply to support Valve as a company, 10:57

Adam: Yep. 11:34

Alex: isn’t it? Yeah. 11:34

Geoff: Yeah, fair. 11:35

Stephen: It’s the same thing with Android phones. Do people actually know what runs behind Android? No. They just turn it on, they put their fingerprint on, and they use the thing. 11:36

Alex: Data 11:48

Geoff: Fair. 11:48

Alex: harvester goes… 11:48

Stephen: Well, that’s a different discussion, but yes. 11:50

Geoff: Not that I want to mention LTT twice in the same, you know, podcast, but I mean, they’re they just finished up their Linux challenge, and I think Linus said he’s basically not completely staying on Linux, but he’s staying. Who else? Elijah was going to stay. He was going to dual boot. And then. 11:54

Alex: Luke is already 12:11

Geoff: Luke. 12:12

Alex: pretty much a neckbeard anyway. 12:13

Geoff: Yeah. 12:15

Alex: Yeah. 12:15

Geoff: But I mean, I was not expecting I was expecting Elijah. I knew for you that Luke was going to stay because, you know, for early videos, he was pretty clearly happy and everything was working. Elijah was a bit of a surprise. And then Linus was a complete I did not expect him to be like, oh, yeah, 12:16

Geoff: I’ll do this. 12:34

Alex: It’s an interesting series, that, because, as you say, I don’t necessarily expect… Totally unbiased Linux coverage from that outlet, to be honest with you. 12:36

Geoff: Nope. 12:47

Alex: But this felt like the first time we’ve gotten close. 12:47

Stephen: For sure. And on that, a segue to our sponsor, Patreon. 12:52

Geoff: Well 12:59

Alex: Yes, 12:59

Geoff: done! 12:59

Alex: indeed. Well, we are actually adding Patreon subscribers at quite a clip. Thank you very much to everybody who has subscribed thus far. You make these episodes possible. It’s not a cliche when we say that, genuinely. We pay for the editor for this show out of our own pockets and every one of you that signs up means that Stephen has a little more cheddar to feed his moose, pet moose in the rear. 12:59

Stephen: What? 13:26

Alex: I mean, he’s not feeding the moose in the rear. 13:26

Stephen: What the hell? 13:28

Alex: what 13:31

Geoff: OK, 13:31

Alex: am I talking about 13:31

Geoff: stop, stop. So in particular, we want to thank our terabyte supporters who get a call out is one of the perks of this. We have badnet mask, Alex Taylor, and I’m poop loser. I. 13:32

Alex: okay by the way you must absolutely listeners dear listeners go to pooplosers.net It is a time capsule into the way the internet used to be. Think GeoCities, 13:47

Alex: but better. It’s superb. So thank you very much to our terabyte tier supporters. We very much appreciate you. Now, should we talk about Matter upgrades? Because I believe there’s been a big update in the Matter universe recently. 14:01

Geoff: There actually has. There’s actually been a flurry of announcements the past week or so. So the big 14:16

Alex: But do 14:22

Geoff: thing. 14:22

Alex: they matter? 14:22

Geoff: We could do insert insert. OK, fine. Everyone get all your Matter jokes out. Let’s just get them all out. They’re all there. 14:24

Stephen: We’re 14:32

Geoff: But. 14:32

Stephen: being so matter-of-fact, honestly. 14:32

Adam: Oh. 14:34

Geoff: God. 14:35

Adam: Oh. 14:37

Geoff: All right. So Matter 1.6 was announced on June 17th. So the. 14:39

Alex: It was dark matter. 14:44

Geoff: Are we done? 14:47

Alex: No. 14:48

Stephen: Probably not, but this is making for some great recording, so please continue. 14:49

Adam: Mm-hmm. 14:53

Geoff: So the big thing for Matter 1.6 is what they’re calling joint fabric. And the idea here is that multiple ecosystems, so your Googles, your Amazons, your Apples, they can now all co-administer a single Matter fabric network. So I don’t know if you guys ever played with Matter before, but before, if you set up your system through Google, only Google could control your Matter devices. So if you had an Amazon device, it couldn’t, it couldn’t administer. I think it could still like turn things on and off, but it couldn’t actually add, remove, do anything like that to the stuff that was added by Google, which is why, again, when I was adding things, I always would do things through Home Assistant because that way Home Assistant was the one in control. So this hopefully. 14:55

Alex: Do people actually use anything other than home? I guess they must. 15:38

Geoff: They do a good Google, Google, 15:42

Alex: I 15:44

Geoff: I’m 15:44

Alex: just 15:44

Geoff: sure 15:44

Alex: figured… 15:44

Geoff: Google, Amazon, Ikea is 15:45

Stephen: The Apple 15:47

Geoff: the hub 15:47

Stephen: stuff. 15:47

Geoff: thing. Apple. Yeah. So this is actually interesting because The Verge had an article a couple of months ago about IKEA moving to Matter/Thread from Zigbee stuff and all the issues that were kind of present with matter. And they kind of flagged that as one of the issues of you. Yes, Matter is supposed to create this grand unified thing. But everyone’s still kind of siloing and everyone’s kind of making their own little tweaks to things. So hopefully this one kind of resolves that. But also, interestingly, on an unrelated but yet also at the same time related note, the 15:47

Geoff: Open Home Foundation made a blog post, and it’ll be linked in the comment or in the show notes, called Proxy All the Things. And they basically said, you know, with the recent announcement, they’ve been adding infrared control. They’ve been adding RF control. They’ve been doing a whole lot of things to kind of bring more device classes as first class citizens into Home Assistant. And so now your ESPHome can control all this stuff that you already may have. without having to buy anything new. So it’s kind of an interesting dichotomy of Matter is kind of, you know, okay, maybe that’s future looking as to stuff you might buy is all going to be matter compliant, but Home Assistant is like, we want to make everything work. 16:25

Alex: Forgive me for being a little skeptical at this point. I don’t know when the first time we mentioned Matter was on Self Hosted, but I do know it was a long time ago. 17:07

Geoff: Yeah. 17:17

Alex: And since then, there have been multiple moments in history where Matter is supposed to suddenly be here. It’s supposed to have arrived. And I think what this goes to show is just how complicated building a wireless standard is, especially when you want to involve multiple vendors, which to me highlights the need for the Open Home Foundation more than anything in all of this, because we need vendor agnostic providers. things in this world to make a standard like this actually stick. And so I am excited to see Matter actually take another step forward. It’s probably two forward and one back knowing Matter at this point, but you know, I don’t know if I have any Matter devices. How do I tell? 17:17

Geoff: You would know because you have to provision them to get them to join. So I have a couple of. 18:03

Alex: Isn’t it just Zigbee? What’s the difference? 18:08

Geoff: No, no, 18:10

Adam: Mm-mm. 18:11

Geoff: no, no. So there is OK that this is this also is the terrible branding that is Matter. So there is Matter over IP, which was the chip idea. 18:11

Alex: What’s the 18:20

Geoff: That 18:20

Alex: matter 18:20

Geoff: is OK. 18:21

Alex: with you? See, told you 18:21

Geoff: Yeah. 18:22

Alex: I wasn’t done. 18:22

Geoff: Uh-huh. So Matter over IP is the, you know, Wi-Fi based Matter stuff. And I have a few of those devices. I have a bunch of Govee lights, like the ones behind me. Those are Matter compliant. So those work over wireless. And then there is matter over thread with thread being kind of the Zigbee based idea. The idea is you can have a Matter hub that can speak to both the internet protocol stuff and also the Zigbee thread stuff. So again, the idea is to get the idea is to bridge everything into one hub. But I agree with you. It’s still not easy. 18:23

Stephen: Did they patch out the Matter daddy? 19:01

Geoff: The Matter daddy. 19:05

Stephen: Yeah. 19:06

Geoff: I don’t know what you’re talking 19:07

Adam: I’m like, 19:08

Geoff: about, 19:08

Adam: is he 19:08

Geoff: sir. 19:08

Adam: kidding? Is this a joke? 19:08

Geoff: I thought this is a joke. 19:11

Stephen: Someone 19:12

Adam: Yeah. 19:12

Stephen: can ask me what it is. 19:12

Geoff: What’s the Matter? Oh. 19:14

Adam: Oh, no. 19:16

Alex: This is good. 19:22

Geoff: Ah, 19:23

Adam: Cool. 19:24

Stephen: We weren’t done with the Matter jokes. 19:24

Geoff: I apologize to our dear listeners for all the Matter jokes. 19:26

Adam: We also have four dads on this show, so they’re especially bad. 19:31

Geoff: Yeah. 19:35

Alex: As a matter of record. 19:36

Adam: God. 19:39

Geoff: So I guess it’s a Matter of record. We know that we know that Alex doesn’t have any Matter devices. What about Steven or Adam? Do you guys have anything? 19:40

Adam: No, none. I’ve 19:48

Stephen: I have 19:50

Adam: kind of, 19:50

Stephen: provisioned 19:50

Adam: Oh, 19:50

Stephen: a few. 19:51

Adam: I’ve purposely avoided them honestly, just because I’ve heard of the spotty results that people have had with them as far as, um, Getting them to actually, I think mostly what I’ve heard is that there’s been challenges in getting them to connect. But then once I haven’t really heard about flakiness after that fact. 19:52

Stephen: So I actually, I have one device that I was really excited about that it was Matter. And I’ve just recalled exactly what it was. I really like the Nest thermostats because I think that they, A, visually look the nicest. And I really enjoy, you know, turning the little knob to go up and down. It doesn’t matter. Functionally, they work well. That’s why I buy them. But they have never been able to work with the iOS situation, right? But now, because it’s Matter, it links in with that whole Apple Home. And so you can actually just natively 20:12

Stephen: on your iPhone change temperatures in your house on that device, which is, as you know, a Google device and it’s never been a thing. But because Matter, it all works. 20:45

Alex: And what about the UniFi stuff that you’ve got? I know there’s a bunch of UniFi wireless sensors and what have you nowadays. 20:57

Stephen: So you’re asking me how I integrate that with the Apple situation or what? 21:06

Alex: are they not Thread or Matter or are they, are they 21:10

Stephen: No, 21:13

Alex: some custom protocol? 21:13

Stephen: they’re their own thing. So if you, 21:14

Alex: See, 21:16

Stephen: yeah, 21:17

Alex: see what I mean? 21:17

Stephen: right. But they have an insanely nice transmitter receiver, like hub that you can just POE multiple places around your property. And you can even get an extended range antenna that goes like multiple kilometers. Like it’s ridiculous. Right. 21:18

Geoff: Are they LORA based? Is that what they are? 21:34

Stephen: uh 21:38

Geoff: OK, I’ll 21:38

Stephen: don’t know 21:39

Geoff: maybe do 21:39

Stephen: you should look 21:39

Geoff: some looking, but LORA is that super long range, like kilometer, you know. 21:40

Stephen: yeah for sure and then they also have ones that are just the sensor themselves are straight up poe and so you don’t have to worry about any sort of wireless transmission whatsoever or powering some stupid sensor that’s on a window 21:45

Geoff: My secret hope is like I kind of with you and with Adam, like I don’t. I’m not gonna say I necessarily avoid buying Matter-based things, but I certainly don’t make that a point of, I’m gonna buy this because it has Matter. If it happens to have Matter because I want it, cool. But I’m not, and if I was to restart everything and rebuild, I would probably have a Matter-slash-thread-based router instead of a Zigbee-based one, just because that’s kind of what’s there now. But I’m just not seeing a need at this point to 21:58

Alex: So 22:31

Geoff: upgrade. 22:31

Alex: would you say, Geoff, that you are anti-matter? 22:31

Geoff: I 22:34

Stephen: no 22:34

Geoff: am 22:34

Stephen: i 22:34

Geoff: anti-matter. 22:34

Stephen: i think he would i think he’s actually trying to say it really just doesn’t matter to him 22:35

Alex: Go on, Adam. I saw you had your hand up. 22:42

Adam: Oh, I w I was just going to say, um, I’m really interested in the UniFi standard. So can you adopt other devices into that mesh? 22:44

Stephen: no because the idea is that you’re always just using UniFi Protect to interact with these with these sensors now there is a what you call integration into Home Assistant that I absolutely use every single day but fact of the matter is UniFi is trying to keep you in with just their sensors and whatnot so no there’s no third party that I know of that integrates into theirs at all because they would have to come in to protect and that’s a whole closed UniFi ecosystem 22:56

Adam: Fact of the matter? Is 23:26

Adam: that 23:27

Stephen: indeed 23:27

Adam: what she said? 23:27

Stephen: fact of the matter yes that’s what I said yes 23:28

Geoff: Okay, this is fascinating. I’m actually looking them up on the UniFi webpage. They use Bluetooth. 23:31

Stephen: Some of them can. Part of that is to set up the actual sensor. 23:38

Geoff: OK. 23:44

Stephen: So it’s really handy, right? Because you’re not plugging into your network. So how do you configure this thing when it’s wireless, right? And so you’ll deploy your sensor on a wall. You bring up the app. It pops up instantly. It says, hey, do you want to adopt this? And it just goes in. It just pushes the config to the device. 23:45

Geoff: Interesting. Well, again, I’m not looking. My home network is pretty much, I think, set the way I want. So I’m not really seeing a need to upgrade. But I mean, again, in the future, I am hoping that Matter does actually matter in the long run because I don’t see a real downside to it. 24:01

Stephen: Okay, wow. That 24:20

Geoff: But 24:23

Stephen: does, 24:23

Geoff: maybe 24:23

Stephen: yeah. 24:23

Geoff: I’m wrong. Contact us at contact at bitflip.show. If you have thoughts on Matter and whether it matters or whether you have a problem with all the Matter jokes that have been inserted in this show, I will note that I have not made one really so far. 24:23

Alex: There’s still time. 24:36

Stephen: There’s still time. Absolutely. And so speaking of things that have been changing for better or for worse, Jellyfin clients, I think, have been a popular thing to talk about lately because 24:37

Alex: Boy, 24:47

Stephen: Plex. 24:47

Alex: howdy. Yep. 24:48

Stephen: Alex, I don’t suppose you have anything to say about clients of the Jellyfin type. 24:49

Alex: Well, first of all, we should probably start with the news that Jellyfin version 12, release candidate one, is now available. It’s one of those under the cover releases where you’ll do the upgrade from version 10.11 to version 12. Remember, they’re dropping the prefix of the version 10, it’s going, you know, 11, 12. You’ll load it up and you’ll be like, uh it looks the same it doesn’t feel and but all of the changes are performed pretty much all of them anyway are sort of under the covers they’ve been they’ve been tweaking the engine making it run a bit sweeter performance and you know, like larger libraries and they’ve upgraded the FFmpeg version to deal with the vulnerability that came along and that kind of stuff, right? But one area that did see quite a lot of improvements were books. They’ve done a lot of improvements 24:54

Geoff: you 25:49

Alex: to the way that books are going to be handled, like audiobooks, for example, they’ll now scrape the audiobook chapters onto the Jellyfin API so that clients can just query the Jellyfin API and get that information back from the database that way. that’s a big change it’s a nice one that i like to see um i’ll probably take a look at audiobook clients and stuff like that once version 12 is out now i was probably going to do that as part of jellyfin dune but i’ll probably wait because i think it’s you know with those changes probably worth it but uh any anything else in version 12 stand out for any of you gents 25:49

Geoff: I mean, not really. I didn’t really. I mean, I watched your video and I didn’t really do a whole deep dive in on myself other than definitely read the release notes because it looks like there’s definitely some things to keep in mind if you’re upgrading. And I’m kind of hoping they smooth some of those over a little bit when they get out of the release candidate stage. 26:24

Alex: It’s a one-way upgrade. There are some database schema changes and migrations that have to happen. And so for anybody 26:40

Alex: that’s listening that’s not familiar with what that means, by the way, when you create a database, it’s a bunch of information in columns, like tables, like… with you know links and what have you and when you’re designing a database you’ve got to figure out how all that stuff connects together right so like an episode id over here gets reused in that table over there to link up to show this piece of metadata in the right place right if you change that schema you need to write a script 26:47

Alex: that migrates all the existing databases to the new version of the database Now, what the developers are not going to do is spend time on an open source project at least, writing a reversion script i have worked for a bank in london that spent a great deal of time on those revert scripts you know so if an upgrade does go south you have snapshots you have backups you have scripts that should undo everything in fact there are entire companies that are dedicated to snapshotting databases in real time liquid base is one of them there’s many more and um you know so the idea is you upgrade from jellyfin 11 to version 12 That’s a one-way ticket, my friend. So make sure that you take a snapshot of your ZFS data set that your Jellyfin database lives on. 27:14

Adam: I approve of that statement. 28:02

Alex: Do you put all your app data on ZFS then, Adam? 28:06

Adam: Absolutely. Yes. 28:08

Geoff: Nope. 28:11

Adam: Geoff. 28:12

Alex: Geoff is raw 28:13

Geoff: Yeah, 28:14

Alex: dogging 28:14

Geoff: I don’t 28:14

Alex: it over 28:14

Geoff: run 28:14

Alex: there. 28:15

Geoff: it. I actually don’t really run ZFS. 28:15

Adam: Who. 28:18

Alex: What do you do then? I’m curious. I’m not judging. I’m just curious. 28:18

Geoff: MergerFS and SnapRAID. 28:22

Alex: You got your app data on MergerFS too. 28:24

Geoff: No, app data goes on solid, I mean, solid state drives. 28:27

Stephen: Running what? 28:31

Alex: I 28:31

Geoff: Running ext4 for whatever the 28:33

Adam: Okay. 28:36

Geoff: VM LXC gives me. 28:36

Alex: wish I had your confidence, Geoff. I truly admire that. 28:38

Geoff: It’s been working fine for me, knocking on wood for a couple of years, and I ain’t touching it. 28:42

Alex: It will until one day it ain’t. 28:48

Geoff: That’s what backups are for, my friend. That’s what backups 28:51

Alex: Well, I 28:53

Geoff: are 28:53

Alex: suppose 28:53

Geoff: for. 28:53

Alex: at least you have them. All 28:54

Geoff: Oh, 28:55

Adam: Did 28:55

Alex: right. 28:55

Adam: you test? 28:55

Geoff: I got good backups. 28:55

Adam: Did you test them? 28:56

Geoff: I have tested them many 28:58

Adam: Okay. 28:59

Geoff: times. 28:59

Adam: Okay. 29:00

Stephen: Okay, so I am curious, since we’re on the Jellyfin thing here, Alex, obviously you have a lovely video out about this that is somewhat lengthy. I’d love to know, because I have the opportunity to ask the person that authored the video, out of all the clients, where did you find the best client exists in the sense of like on Apple TV or on some sort of like handheld device or where does that work? 29:00

Geoff: You asking best overall or best like 29:29

Stephen: Yeah, 29:31

Geoff: per 29:31

Stephen: I mean, 29:31

Geoff: platform? 29:31

Stephen: like overall, because like I really enjoy the Apple TV Plex app, for example, I find that that is the place I want to use Plex. And so if I were to go to Jellyfin tomorrow, am I going to be happy with whatever’s in Apple TV or am I running out to get myself an Android box of some sort? 29:31

Alex: So I broke this up into, at the moment, the only video that’s out is tvOS. And it was my hope that this video would take me, I did a live stream and I thought, right, I’ll just turn around the next day and basically turn and chop the live stream up into, and 29:51

Alex: I couldn’t do that. Then I looked at the number of clients in the Apple App Store, and I’m like, this has got to be a dedicated tvOS video. So I’ve released an hour and 10 minute long video. Don’t know what’s wrong with me. Perfect Media Server Part 3 was an hour and 10 minutes. This one’s an hour. Anyway, and there are 16 clients for the tvOS in there. Now, I haven’t 30:09

Alex: gotten to Android yet, although I can already tell you the conclusion. Wolphin, it’s amazing. It’s great. It’s fast. It’s performant. iOS is another beast, so I’ll have to do another video on iOS. I really like StreamyFin on iOS, though. That’s a really, really strong one. But on tvOS, let’s talk about tvOS because that’s the one I’ve actually reviewed. And not to spoil the conclusion of the video either, but… There are four strong contenders, four and a half on tvOS. You’ve got Infuse, which I’m sure we all know about, right? It’s the incumbent, right? And the thing about Infuse that’s kind of weird is it’s not a jellyfin client at all. 30:30

Alex: It’s just 31:10

Adam: Mm-hmm. 31:11

Alex: a video player that happens to speak to Jellyfin and kind of sort of as an afterthought present you a Jellyfin looking kind of library. Same is true of another app called SenPlayer, S-E-N player. That does basically the same model as Infuse. It’s a video player first and then you attach it to other servers. But SenPlayer does a much better job of making that library integration feel less like it’s bolted on and more part of the experience. So that SendPlayer kind of surprised me a lot actually in this review. The other one I really liked was one called Plezy, P-L-E-Z-Y. This used to be a Plex client as I understand it, and they recently pivoted to support Jellyfin. So it doesn’t have all the features that I believe the dev wants to add to it yet. But it was pretty much, on this day in history, Pleasy was pretty much my favorite client. That said, Moonfin is nipping 31:11

Alex: at its heels pretty strongly. Now, the thing about Moonfin is its pace of development is very, very rapid. On my live stream last weekend, there was a bunch of UI bugs and stuff like that. I then came to review it two days later, and there’d been a complete visual refresh. And there were still some bugs, and it’s not finished. But they’ve got this idea of this thing called Moonbase, which you put onto your server, and then you push out configuration from the Jellyfin server to all of your clients. So you can tell the clients only stream at 720p, or this user is only allowed to stream at 720p, or they’re only allowed 32:14

Geoff: Hmm. 32:56

Alex: this rating, so they can only see this library. And that’s configured from the server side and pushed out to remote clients. Pretty interesting idea. My absolute favorite, though, was one called Neptune. And by far and away, Neptune, I think, has the most potential out of 32:56

Alex: all of the clients I’ve looked at to just be my default go-to client in this arena. I think the feature that stood out to me the most was AI-powered search. And before you roll your eyes, imagine that you can go into the search box and say a quote from your favorite show, and it just brings up that episode. or you can just remember a plot point, you know, the movie about the time machine car. Obviously, we know that’s Back to the Future, but no other search box on this planet in a media player is going to return Back to the Future. Neptune does. So I really like it. There’s an iOS companion app coming for Neptune as well, really soon. I’ve been talking a lot with the developer because he’s a motorsports nerd and we kind of bonded over that. So Neptune for me was… Rough around the edges right now, but having spoken to the developer and he came to my live stream, a few of those devs actually did, which was kind of cool, actually. I got a kick out of that. A lot of these clients are changing rapidly. This is where the brain trust is right now, is developing jellyfin clients, it would seem. There was a lot of garbage. There was a lot of very average clients too. You have to go watch the video to figure those out. But yeah, Neptune, really like that one. 33:14

Adam: So a couple of questions for you on this. So you’re saying, is it mostly just look and feel, or is there specific features and functionality that make you come to that conclusion? Yeah, that’s one of my main questions. And then follow-up question, you mentioned the AI in there. And I’m like, conceptually, that’s cool if it works. If it doesn’t work, then that’s just going to be irritating as all get out, just like all these other search functions that I’ve played with. 34:33

Alex: well the the AI stuff i’ll come to that first the the AI stuff is optional you can turn it off and you don’t have to use it it only uses by default on device local models on the Apple TV so again No real privacy concerns there. If you want to throw your credit card at it and give it a ChatGPT or an Anthropic API key, you can absolutely do that as well. It supports Openrouter too, so you can have one gateway that talks to all the backends. In my experience, right now, today, it’s pretty hit or miss. If you put ChatGPT on it, it’s a lot less hit or miss. The on-device model is subpar, frankly. But it will also speak to Ollama, so you can run it fully locally as well. So, I don’t know. For us nerds, it’s a pretty cool idea, pretty cool feature. um when it comes to how did i decide which like i have i built this a vibe coded this app that is like a so like a ranking board so I looked at things like what were the first run defaults like do I have to configure a bunch of stuff just to make it look and feel homely. How was the login experience? Did it support the Jellyfin quick connect thing? Did I have to type in my server address or did it auto discover it? All of those little paper cuts that add up. I also looked at things like how is the library 35:05

Adam: Mm-hmm. 36:29

Alex: presented? Some of them did weird things like putting the library like way at the bottom after like six or seven rows. And I’m like, nah, I just want the TV and movies up the top, bro. Like, what are you doing? Then there’s things like format handling. Can it transcode? Can I change the bit rates? Not every client lets you do that, weirdly. Yeah. How are the player controls? Can I change the subtitles midstream? Some clients don’t let you do that. You have to back out of the video, change the subtitles. You see what I mean? It’s just all these little things that in the Plex world are just a given. But in the Jellyfin world, you kind of have to do your homework. So I then looked at things like overall polish and maturity of the clients. And, you know, the ones that are updating really fast, I couldn’t give a high score to those because I know that they’re not finished. And then extra features, things like AI search. And do they support things like scrobbling to Trakt? and other third-party tracking my watch history services, that kind of thing. Jellyseer is another one. Can I request movies directly from the client? Some of them, yes. Many of them, no. So there’s a lot of really cool features that only exist in Jellyfin land that we are at that point of adoption with Jellyfin now where if you give it just a couple of years, it’s going to be a no-brainer. You will just have an amazing time. Right now, it’s kind of sort of getting out of the primordial ooze of early adoption. Like, we’re almost there, but not quite. 36:29

Stephen: The little things really do matter. 38:06

Alex: Hmm. 38:10

Geoff: See, one more Matter joke. I do have a, 38:10

Alex: Ah. 38:14

Geoff: I do have one question for you. Cause this is, this is the, it’s this Jellyfin June. It’s the last episode we’re going to record in June. Are you staying with Jellyfin? 38:14

Alex: Oh, 100%. Plex is gone. It’s out. 38:24

Geoff: Oh, okay. 38:26

Alex: Yeah. No question. I mean, to be honest with you, because I’ve been doing the Perfect Media Server and I’ve been playing with Jellyfin every day, I’ve got a lot of it dialed in now in a way that I wouldn’t have bothered if I wasn’t recording the series. And I hope to impart some of that wisdom, hopefully, in the series. And I’ve got a couple of videos coming up. on iOS specifically, on Android specifically. I might merge those two together. And Android TV as well, as well as like plugin ecosystems and stuff like that. There’s a bunch of stuff with plugins, which unfortunately most of the plugins don’t translate to the clients. Like it’s just literally, you’re literally just theming the website. And I’m like, well… 38:26

Geoff: Yeah, that’s always been my, I’ve looked at everyone’s like, everyone’s like, oh, you got to use like, what is the jellyfin? There was a couple of plugins that like make things look beautiful, but I’m like, but they only work on the webpage, not in the client. So I don’t really see the point. 39:06

Alex: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, I mean, look, Jellyfin is not perfect. There have been some paper cuts, like, you know, library scans just get stuck for some reason sometimes. I don’t know why. I now have a Hermes job going in every night and checking for CPU, you know, is there a CPU job is it doing intro skip detection no is it doing thumbnail extraction no okay well it’s just stuck then if it’s been there for two hours or more and then it will restart the container for me automatically so you know it’s not the end of the world but it’s definitely not it’s definitely not a product it’s definitely an open source project and I mean that in the most polite way possible it’s just a little rough around the edges and I kind of love it for it you know 39:20

Adam: I kind of love the Spartan nature of it too. I’m hoping that they don’t add so much that it takes away from the simple, clean, beautiful interface aspect. And yeah, you could complain about lack of features, but in a way that’s kind of a feature in and of itself for some people. I enjoy that, the lack of clutter. It just makes, it gets everything out of the way. And I’m talking specifically about the Android client for Android TV. I have it on my Shield TV and I’ve always enjoyed that. I very much don’t enjoy the lack of availability of that experience across all these other platforms. I hate that actually. The fact that I have to go from one experience and then I get a totally different experience on like my iPad. not a fan of that but um but yeah so i hope that they don’t lose some of that that magic of having it so like simple and opinionated in that in that the way that open source projects tend to be also 40:07

Alex: I should probably take a look at Emby I’m getting a lot of comments I see a lot of people saying 41:16

Geoff: No, no. 41:20

Alex: Emby is it 41:21

Adam: nope 41:22

Alex: no why 41:23

Adam: it it’s like diet coke Plex and so then why 41:24

Geoff: I mean, this is coming from a guy who ran Emby for years before I switched over to Jellyfin. It’s fine. But quite frankly, there was nothing in Emby that doesn’t exist in Jellyfin in my mind. So I don’t. 41:29

Alex: And it’s not open source. 41:46

Geoff: I think it’s still partly open. I think the problem is they close source some bits, like the transcoding when I switched 41:48

Alex: Right. 41:55

Geoff: off. 41:55

Alex: We’re having this discussion. That’s 41:55

Geoff: Yeah. 41:57

Alex: an issue. 41:58

Geoff: Yep. 41:59

Alex: There’s a lot of projects in this world that are sort of mostly open, but some parts are like, all right, well, then it’s not open source. 42:00

Geoff: Right. 42:09

Alex: I think it’s a fairly clear line. It’s like Jellyfin is the free, it’s open source, That’s it. End of qualifiers. 42:09

Stephen: My Google foo is telling me that the current status of Emby is that it is now closed source. And while you can view the core source code in some capacities on GitHub, the official distribution now incorporates proprietary modules and a closed source component. 42:19

Geoff: That’s that’s where I think things were when I switched over. 42:36

Alex: Which they’re perfectly within their rights to do. Of course they are. And I think just ignoring it completely wouldn’t really be a responsible journalistic thing to do. I kind of feel like that’s what my role is in this whole Jellyfin switch thing lately. So I’ve got to take a look at it. But I suspect this Perfect Media Server ate a week. And then the tvOS client ate another week. And here we are on nearly the end of June. It’s going to have to run into July, isn’t it? 42:39

Geoff: Jellyfin July. 43:08

Alex: Oh, good. The alliteration still works. So we’re good. 43:09

Adam: Just give Emby a day. It does not deserve a week. I’m just telling you, like, I’ve experienced it. I’ve used it recently because Space Invader 1, Ed, has shared his Emby with me. Kindly of him. Thank you, Ed. But it’s not a great experience. It’s just not. There’s 43:13

Alex: I’ll do 43:34

Adam: no… 43:34

Alex: it in a month that starts with an E then. 43:34

Adam: There you go. Perfect. Because I’ll tell you what, the way that you should look at this is what is the killer feature that would make you want Emby? Like if you want 43:36

Alex: I don’t know 43:46

Adam: the entire feature list, including like easy remote sharing, blah, blah, blah, go with Plex. If you want… Uh, the free and open source again, the, the clean interface and all of that go with Jellyfin. I just don’t see, I honestly don’t understand how it still exists personally. 43:47

Alex: Yeah, well, I found out something pretty amazing in the last two weeks as well, actually. I think this was doing the rounds on Reddit. Elan Feingold, you know, the founder of Plex, no longer works at Plex. 44:07

Adam: Ooh. 44:20

Alex: And 44:20

Geoff: Really 44:21

Alex: he has taken the source code or he has maintained access to the source code for PlexAmp. And he’s the only person working on PlexAmp. He’s no longer a Plex employee, yet he still works on the only thing at Plex that’s actually good. What? 44:22

Geoff: fascinating. 44:39

Adam: That just made me 44:40

Adam: think about like Bitwarden, because again, their founder with everything that’s going on over there, that would be really interesting if he actually did stick to his guns as thing. If it did, if it did not saying it’s going to, but if it in shitified, if he would bail and do something similar like that, it’d be interesting. 44:41

Alex: Yeah, well, time will be the only judge on this particular story. So somehow I think we’ve come to the end of episode number nine. Thank you all so much for listening and a big thank you to our patrons. I’ve been Alex. 45:00

Adam: I’ve been Adam. 45:13

Geoff: I’ve been Geoff. 45:14

Stephen: And I’ve been Steven. 45:16